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.

blog no more?

In a media class built atop blogging it's only natural to focus on this underlying media at some point. With relentless media coverage on social media, including mobile media upstarts such as Foursquare, blogs have fallen somewhat out of the limelight of late.


One example of the changing nature of blogs is the Gawker media empire:


       


Nick Denton is the creator of this blog empire, but he recently announced that he's moving his media properties away from blogs and toward online magazines. And so Gawker's traditional blog, which looked like this:

will now look like this:

The difference between the two (the new beta version can be found here) is one of curation; the first is just a typical reverse-chronological blog scroll of entries while the new one has more editorial input as far as placement and thus the context of stories. Given Gawker's ironic, snarky tone, this move allows the editors to juxtapose stories snarkily against each other - again, with props to McLuhan, the media is ever more so the message here.

Why the redesign? 

Denton wants to increase his already formidable audience. When Gizmodo was the first to leak an image of the iPhone 4, the blog's traffic quadrupled for the week. However, because the story was so hot, the blog actually had to stop posting new entries for six hours so that it could keep that traffic generator at the top of the page; otherwise, it would be burying the hottest story it'd probably ever had. Turning the blog into more of an online newsmagazine, with one main story at the top anchoring smaller, related ones below it will allow Denton to keep hot stories on fire and drive traffic to those smaller stories as well.  

At the same time, the new format will also allow for more effective use of images and video. As Denton explains, "People don't really want to read text. They want videos, images, bigger and more lavish." 

As a result of this move, founder Denton expects his 450 million monthly page views to balloon to one billion monthly page views within a year of the relaunch.  

Says Denton: "I'm out of blogs. I don't want to be the No. 1 blog network anymore. That's like being king of the playground."

After reading this, I went over to Technorati, the premier blog directory, to get some blog statistics for this post. When I got there, though, I stopped in my tracks. What used to itself be a blog now looks like... a Denton newsmagazine.

Lose twenty pounds and gain four inches!!!

Need a cure for erectile dysfunction? A college diploma? A mail order bride? Warcraft gold? Wanna get rich quick?
Need to lose twenty pounds? Want a mind-blowing orgasm?

Spam probably says as much about us as anything else - after all, if people weren't buying, they wouldn't be selling.

But still: what a strange world!

It's been 40 years since this Monty Python sketch was broadcast. While it just seems odd today, the reason British audiences laughed is that because after WWII killed their food industry, they were stuck with this low-cost import that seemed to be everywhere while meat was scarce.

In the early days of AOL, when bandwidth was scarce, chat rooms would get flooded with Monty Python spam quotes in order to get unwanted users to go away: Star Wars geeks would flood Star Trek chat rooms with the Spam song or text images. With dial-up speeds so slow, it would take forever for the spam to arrive, driving Trekkies  mad while Star Warriors giggled in their parents' basements.

Eventually, spam transformed from nerd humor to big money. With billions of dollars at stake, spammers keep outpacing spam filters. They've gone from emails to social networks like Facebook to embedded links in YouTube videos to burrowing their way into Tweets. They've also gotten more dangerous: while the amount of spam has dropped in the last year, the amount of viruses they contain has jumped over 40% in the last three months, making spam among the most annoying and dangerous medium.

On a brighter note, it's spawned a new genre: spoetry. (More here.) And you can make your own here. There's also spam art, too.

And if you're looking to get into this exciting field, there's always Spam U!

Order today! Our operators are standing by!

hate and love online

"[T]he old system of exclusion and insulation are stagnation and death. National health can only be maintained by the free and unobstructed interchange of each with all.... It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while [there is] an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth" (Charles F. Briggs, 1858, quoted in James W. Carey, Communication as Culture, p. 205).

While Briggs was speaking of the telegraph as the instrument that would foster worldwide communication and usher in a brave, new world, he could just as easily been writing about the early days of the internet.

When I was first online, it seemed like you could be anyone you wanted to be. This in turn let you speak your mind - and learn from others doing the same. I remember so many stories of people meeting from different parts of Turkey - and around the world, for that matter - who wound up being friends or even getting married. This would have been impossible without the internet and really made me feel that the planet was getting smaller and friendlier.

I still want to feel that way, but sometimes the facts just get in the way. In September, for example, at least five gay students committed suicide due to online bullying, the most famous of which happened because a kid's roommate was streaming a live feed of him and his boyfriend being intimate. Of course, this has caused a lot of people to grieve online and organize online to protest this, so I know that the internet <i>can</i> make the world a better place through free speech. But it just seems outweighed by how much "old prejudices and hostilities" flood the 'net.

Never mind the anti-gay thoughts online, as a foreign-born Muslim living in the US, I cringe and feel sad and sometimes scared by the anti-Muslim stuff I find online. I see my religion of Islam distorted into one of hate and ignorance by people who've probably never even met a Muslim. The internet makes it easier than ever to spread such ignorance.

Of course, such ignorance isn't unique to one country. Plenty of my Muslim brethren get caught up in anti-Western ignorance. Hell, Palestinian children are being named "Hitler" and his book Mein Kampf is a bestseller. And the use of the internet to bring up old wounds and create new ones isn't limited to Christians, Jews and Muslims any more than it is to gays and rednecks. 

Serbian extremists, for example, are using Facebook, Twitter, blogs and websites to spread hate. Haters from Argentina to Wales, from Greece to Estonia, Denmark to Ukraine and beyond are putting hate music up online to stir up trouble and spread ignorance.

Carney wrote that the telegraph, by linking peoples from different regions together in a common language "reworked the nature of the written language and finally the nature of awareness itself" (210). Language got stripped of adjectives and opinions and became more "objective," since bandwidth was extremely limited in that medium.

The internet, by contrast, is much, much more closer to being unlimited. It's like the difference between Twitter and YouTube. Hate groups can post movies, words and pictures that are anything but "scientific" or "objective" - it is the complete opposite of the telegraph. As for the telegraph, it too was used by large news organizations that sought a commonness among different consumers much like most television advertisers on the major networks don't want to stir up trouble. As a result, there really was no opportunity for one person to cause too much trouble with the telegraph. Of course, that's all changed with the internet.

There are those that want to censor the internet and I think that the cure would be worse than the disease. The world is a tough place and the internet at times can reflect that. But at the same time, it gets balanced out when people rallied to fight anti-gay prejudice last month - or raised millions online for the earthquake victims in Haiti or the Indonesian tsunami victims. The answer isn't in stopping people from speaking, but rather in educating them, in getting rid of the injustices and inequalities in the world. While it is naive to think that this will happen overnight, the patient struggle against evil is better than a quick fix that will in reality solve nothing.

It's just too bad that Briggs wasn't right about global communication.

I'm gonna be rich! Thanks, Bill!!!

I'm forwarding a forwarded message...read on, it it works you may get $$ from Microsoft. Certainly Bill has enough to share-maybe today we'll be blessed financially!

I am forwarding this because the person who sent it to me is a good friend and does not send me junk. Microsoft is the largest Internet company and in an effort make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft is running an e-mail beta test. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $5.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $3.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $1.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check. I thought this was a scam myself, but two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on, Microsoft contacted me for my e-mail and within days, I received a check for $800.00.

I get this email, or a version of it, every few months - sometimes from friends who should know better and sometimes from spammers who could care less. I usually just quickly delete it, but the last time it popped up in my inbox from a friend, I wondered why she would pass it on, so I emailed her back asking if she thought it was real. She IM'd me back, saying that she thought so, but either way, it couldn't hurt.

I reread the message again in disbelief. Now, I can be gullible at times too, especially when I first came to the United States because of the cultural differences, but this one is soooo hard to swallow. After all, there just is no way that this could work - it is technically impossible. Emails just don't work that way.

Even if it were possible, think about how awful that would be. I know in the Facebook age, we often give up a bunch of our privacy without thinking about it, but if companies had the ability to find out who we sent emails to and so on, it'd be even scarier. It's bad enough that Google scans our gMails so it can insert relevant ads. (Of course, the US government can do more - it reads our emails and faxes and texts and Tweets - and that too is scary, but a point for a different time.)

Of course, it's easy enough to prove that the Microsoft email is a hoax - you can Google it or go to Snopes.com to find out. It made me think of Cantril's account of the War of the Worlds broadcast, where he analyzed why so many people couldn't figure out that the broadcast wasn't real (The Invasion of Mars). He found that some people just don't have a 'critical faculty' (13). These people either were religious or undereducated (and have a context into which the invasion fit), weren't sure of how to interpret the supposed invasion, or didn't have any existing standards of judgment to interpret the broadcast.

In the case of the email, my friend who passed it on in the expectation of getting money (or at least doing no harm) used technology without understanding it at all. She knew how to Tweet before anybody else I knew, but couldn't explain how it worked even if she were paid to come up with an answer and could use the internet for research! She just doesn't have a critical faculty and really has no existing standards of judgment as to how to interpret the email, much less any other technology.

In a way, she reminds me of some of my religious friends who use Pascal's Wager to justify their belief in their religion. The Wager is - if you believe in God and he exists, you can go to heaven. If you don't believe in God and he exists, you go to Hell. And if you believe in God but he doesn't exist, no harm done. In much the same way, when I pressed her on it, my friend just gave me Pascal's Wager for the email, not thinking about the harm that comes to the internet's speed when millions of technologically undereducated people clog up the net with emails like this one.

Come to think of it, given her lack of critical faculties, I should have told her that Google has a new marketing scheme meant to cripple Microsoft - it counts how many of those Microsoft emails you don't forward and pays you $2000 for every one you delete instead. Somehow, I think Orson Welles would approve. :)