Recently in Internet Category
I've spoken about my personal cloud - my corner of the internet, reachable and usable from anywhere at any time. I've thought on it long and hard, and I think it's the right way to go. I should not be sitting at my office thinking to myself, "Gosh, I wish I had my personal laptop with me so I could look at this bookmark I have instead of having to track it down all over again."
And should it really be this hard to keep my calendar up to date? Remembering everything until I get home and updating things there and hoping not to double book myself, which is an inevitability for me.
And then there are tags - this wonderful new way of making my cloud searchable. It's the way of the future and you'll start seeing more of that here, too. Sure, they apply to bookmarks, but why not everything else? Why not email?
Google has really embraced a lot of this and has created a great set of tools accordingly. But even these tools have their failings and drawbacks.
First question. Is it better to stick with a unified solution, such as Google, rather than picking and choosing tools that might be a better fit but require more work to integrate? That's a hard question for me to answer right now.
Second question. Can device independence negatively impact the user experience? My answer is yes. By now anyone who knows me knows I am a happy Mac user and I love the core set of utilities provided. Unlike many of my friends, I do use Apple's Mail.app for my email rather than Thunderbird. I do use iCal and Address Book. I do not use Safari because I do not like its rendering engine, but that's another post. The point here is that I enjoy using client-side tools, and I don't feel good about abandoning that. I prefer to maintain local copies of my data and, when possible, manipulating that data locally when possible.
What happens if a server is down for maintenance, or for some outage. What happens if my internet connection is down. What happens if Google experiences data loss. We can reduce this to one big question - what happens when I give up control.
So I appeal to anyone who has read this far along. Have you chosen to trust Google with your personal data? What were your other choices, and how did you come to terms with such a massive change?
The Adium blog is reporting on MSN Censorship and their findings are really fascinating to me. Even for Microsoft, it strikes me as kind of a "lazy" approach to solving the world's exploit problems. What's next, declaring an embargo on a country's URL code? This just in, Canada goes with Linux for its national website - .ca URLs no longer work in MSN Messenger.
Okay, maybe I took that a little far. But all of .info? I think they took it a little far, too.
Slashdot is reporting that eBay has banned Google Payments. There are a lot of people hollering about how unfair this is, but I really want to call attention to this comment that points out:
eBay specifically states that any "new" service without a track record of privacy protection and customer service will be scrutinized and most likely prohibited until it has some history.
I find that point important enough to call a little bit of extra attention to it.
This is another case where I can't do much better than the site I'm quoting, and instead want to just call attention to it.
2005-08-22: W3C has written to the US Copyright Office regarding a notice of proposed rulemaking. The notice asks if persons filing electronic-only preregistration forms will experience difficulties if the Office requires them to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser. W3C comments to the Copyright Office suggest that requiring a single browser is inappropriate for government services and encourages the Office to pursue standards-based access in accordance with US Federal policy. Read W3C's letter and About W3C.
This article, or rather brief blog posting, indicates that America Online has initiated a project to unify instant messaging.
There are quite a few reasons I hold this to be a good thing, but at the top of my list is that we're not going to have to play games with these instant messaging service wars any longer. No more being forced to use Trillian or Adium or Gaim or what have you to be on multiple networks. If I had to guess, we're going to see these companies take a cue from .mac and how it interacts with AIM. Instead of using multiple protocols, we'll see a merged protocol, webcam ready, offline message ready, and so on and so forth. We're going to see a unified service, one giant protocol in which you may use your client of choice. And usernames? Well, usernames show up like e-mail addresses. Just like .mac. You would see username@mac, username@aim, username@yahoo, and every other service that buys into it. You'd be able to choose who you want the account with, but talk to everyone.
And I can believe that this will finally happen. It's something I've wanted for along, long time. The danger I see is folks trying to get their username on every service straight off. That'll produce a massive rush, which could be hard to deal with. That will slow down, though, I'm sure.
This could be the beginning of a good new thing for instant messaging.
Everyone seems to be in such an uproar about this court decision to let people read your e-mail. Oh the tragedy, oh what a terrible invasion of privacy! How dare they?
Wait... you mean to tell me this has been going on for years? Meet carnivore, or whatever they're calling it these days. E-mail wiretapping has been around for a very, very long time, whether people want to admit it or not. Just because this is the first it's been in the news for a while doesn't mean it hasn't been happening. The FBI has been doing it for years.
We all watch the video clips that surface online. The weird little jokes, the strange digital enhancements, the close-ups of Janet Jackson's piercing. But every once in a while, something real sneaks into the mix. A video of a man committing suicide after his girlfriend broke up with him has appeared online.
This is not a joke, people. It's out there. I ask you, please don't encourage this stuff. The jokes are all in good fun. Some of them, many of them, are totally tasteless. But they're still jokes. This isn't one of them. Help put a stop to it.
Okay, I've held my tongue and held my tongue and held my tongue. But Gmail just keeps having more and more problems. So it started with the privacy agreement. People are worried about the fact that Google will keep their mail even after they shut down their accounts as "a service." That's a privacy issue. They're worried about using orkut cookies, google cookies, and gmail cookies all together for law enforcement or spying.
And now there's a trademark dispute. Seems that another company has been using the name Gmail for their e-mail services for two years. A small company, but widespread enough to have reached into about eighty countries.
Come on, Google, do your homework. Why are you in such a rush all of a sudden?
This article talks about Microsoft's search engine, and about how they didn't do any of the research for it in house. The company says they'll improving their engine's design and effectiveness. It's a bold move for a company like this to admit that they made a mistake in the past, but this is a pretty graceful way to do it.
If they succeed as well as they say they will, we'll see google's traffic drop somewhat, I think. I see that as a probability only because people, as a crude generalized whole, are fundamentally lazy. Most people still use Microsoft Internet Explorer, and most of those people still have MSN as their home page. So if they don't have to go somewhere else to perform their search, do you really think they will? I doubt it.