no thanks, facebook - you already know too much

Looks like Facebook's at it again. In its relentless quest to sell all your information, it's now rolling out a new messaging platform that it hopes its users adopt. Basically, it just bundles together text messages, chats and emails in one package, hoping that its ease of use makes it compelling.

That ease of use, though, is also one of its drawbacks. See, in getting rid of "subject lines and other formalities" and making "everything you've ever discussed with each friend as a single conversation" it's also turning communications into an unnavigable nightmare.

It's tough enough to follow long email conversation threads - and that's with subject lines and whatever navigation aids your platform allows. Here, picture having every chat, text and email bundled together by friend. If you want to find a turkey recipe you discussed last year, you have to go through the entire thread. If you use gmail by contrast, you have but to search "turkey recipe" and it'll scour your messages and have an answer for you in under a second. Facebook, on the other hand, is moving backwards - it's like going from a CD to a cassette tape. Or like from an iPhone voicemail system to traditional voicemail, where you have to listen to everything.

Ugh.

Even worse, of course, is the privacy implications.

Can you imagine your boss or any other of your "friends" being able to see your communications? How about any company on the planet willing to pay pennies to Facebook for the privilege.  It's bad enough that Facebook has followed its formula of taking away privacy, then giving the illusion of a little bit back, then repeating. Now it wants to have access to all of our communications, dreaming of turning that into cash. If it's successful, it will not only be able to sell your demographic and network analysis data, it will now be able to provide marketers with real-time communications data.

Of course, gmail already does this. But: gmail doesn't know your birthdate, your zip code, the school you graduated from, all your social contacts, etc. Better to keep whatever data I can from Facebook, so it doesn't know everything about me.

In the end, I've already given away too much of my information to Facebook. I'll keep the rest separate from them - in an easier to use, non-Facebook email platform. If Facebook wants my communications data, it's going to have to buy it from Google. :)

making the world safe for books, puppies and hedgehogs

Every time we go to leave a comment on one of our media blogs, we encounter a CAPTCHA, the little reading test that is designed to prevent, or at least reduce, comment spam. In case you were wondering, it stands for  Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Turing here refers to Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computers. His test? He thought that computers would never have true "intelligence" but that if they could fool a human in conversation, that'd be close enough.

If a person remotely asked a question and couldn't tell
if the response was from either a computer or a person,
the computerized response would pass the Turning Test.

At any rate, CAPTCHAs have spread throughout the online world and besides combating comment spam, they also prevent online polls from getting trashed by automated computer assaults. They can be used to protect website registrations and sometimes help fight email spam, among other things.


With the millions of CATCHAs being processed each day, somebody noticed that all this effort really wasn't being fully harnessed. In response, reCAPTCHA was developed. This new upgrade took all that problem-solving energy and applied it to a problem: digitizing books. And so now millions of people a day at Facebook and countless other sites are asked to type the words that come from a scanned book and are helping to get books digitized and freely available online, like at Archive.org.

This small shift in thinking in harnessing that energy in turn cause a small revolution in the world of CAPTCHAs. Now, not only are books being digitized but CAPTCHAs are being modified to serve all sorts of needs. Users are no longer just encountering text, as programmers have shifted to image recognition. And so Petfinder.org, for example, uses the dog/cat Turing Test for its CAPTCHAs. 

And just look at all the uses for the new generation of CAPTCHAs, some useful, some goofy, some cute and some just downright bizarre, in this unexpectedly developing new medium:

This one's from the website HotOrNot.com:

Fail:

And here are a few from some math sites:

Lastly, I just wanted to leave you with yet another iteration of this emerging media: the cartoon...

goodbye, websurfing old friend

Since I've been old enough to get online, it seems like web surfing has been an ever-expanding media. Each year more and more of my friends were checking out websites, a move mirrored globally.

Not so for this last year.

For the first time ever, web browsing has seen a decline - at least in North and Latin America and Asia-Pacific. In 2009, almost 40% of all online traffic in North America was centered on web browsing, a percentage that dropped almost in half to just over 20% in 2010, a trend mirrored every where else but in Europe. That continent, by contrast, saw surfers surge from 26% to almost 45% in that time.

What media gained at web browsing's expense?

For starters, more people are consuming real-time entertainment, a category that rose from 30% to over 42%. Real-time entertainment essentially refers to online television and movies, with Netflix alone accounting for 1/5 of all downstream activity.

Social networking, from Facebook to Foursquare and beyond, has also emerged as a solid media, accounting for almost 3% of traffic, a percentage slightly exceeded by real-time communications such as Skype.

P2P file-sharing, too, has seen an increase from 15% to 19%, though this increase has passed mobile networks by, where the slower networks and smaller memory capacity of cellphones have made file-sharing much less attractive. File-sharing, though, still represents over half of all upstream activity online.

With the emergence of the iPhone and, to an increasing extent the iPad as media platforms, the rate of web surfing could still drop further, since increasing amounts of content are placed inside of apps instead of on websites.  Moreover, the upcoming release of the new World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion, millions of people will once again return to the WoW platform.

Beyond the energizing of the WoW base, this platform is expected to increase its audience as it abandons "grinding" for a more social interaction. Grinding is videogame jargon for making players carry out tasks repetitively in order to gain weapons, powers or other positive attributes. Instead of having to waste time at each level, the game will allow faster training and resource acquisition and instead focus on the more social aspects of the fantasy platform, a move expected to appeal beyond the hardcore gamer demographic.

WoW has increasingly transformed itself into its own platform. Two years ago, for example, the game allowed its players to place the popular game Bejewelled on its platform. Cataclysm will similarly let users play the game Plants vs. Zombies within the WoW environment. This type of integrative approach is yet another example of the alternatives to web browsing that exist and are likely to grow in time.

Another media platform likely to further steal websurfers' spare time is online TV. With Apple entering the product space with its increasingly relevant AppleTV product that makes consuming online television more and more appealing, along with the recent Comcast purchase of NBC that will allow the cable and internet giant the ability and incentive to get more programming online, internet television is expected to take up an ever more increasing percent of online downstream traffic. This can already be seen in the recent drop in cable subscribers as they flock to online television services.

All in all, this is really just a continuation of the seemingly ever-increasing and ever-more-quick adoption of new media and new media platforms of the last century. It just seems surreal, however, to see web surfing going from being the new hot thing to an old friend.