When we attended a talk about social networks a few months back, we knew younger users were more prominent on networks like Facebook, but just how much they relied on these networks didn’t occur to us. For example, when it came to internet communication, Generation X built their social contacts around e-mail, while today’s internet youth have effectively replaced e-mail with Facebook. That alone is an interesting discussion topic, for while social networks are often used by older users to retain contact with certain acquaintances, younger users have a much lower threshold for friending someone online. In other words, anyone who is worth even e-mailing is added as a friend, whether or not that person is connected to one of your existing real-world networks.

While the generational shift is noteworthy, we decided to look into how our own forms of online communication have changed.

Ten years ago.

Looking back at how we used the internet 10 years ago, we see a reliance on very different communication networks than today. These are the networks we used on a daily basis a decade ago:

• E-Mail
• ICQ
• AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
• IRC
• Fora

As we said earlier, e-mail was the great mainstay of our generation’s online communications center. Pretty much all intimate conversation with family was done via e-mail, and yet it also served for simple exchanges with people we didn’t have an intimate relationship with. Subscriptions to various mailing lists also served for prolonged discussions between many individuals, making e-mail the ultimate tool for talking to people we discovered elsewhere. In retrospect, perhaps that was e-mail’s greatest weakness: no way to discover new people to correspond with.

The trinity of real-time communication for us was ICQ/AIM/IRC. ICQ came first, and we kept it around for years if only because there were a few luddites we corresponded with who refused to pick up AIM. And as for AIM, well, everyone else had it because everyone else had America Online (AOL). In a lot of ways, AIM was yesteryears’s Facebook, in that it was a cluttered mess of contacts and ad hoc status updates via away messages. Whereas we were more likely to simply set ourself as “Away” in ICQ, AIM was our creative outlet for silly haiku status messages, quotes, and emo rants. We kept AIM around for longer than we should have because it was easier to integrate with iChat and iSight than to start a contact list from scratch, but it was also the most convenient form of communication. In college, for instance, we’d regularly check our AIM messages after getting out of bed, much as we imagine kids do today with their Facebook walls.

The third point of our chat-utility trinity was IRC, and pretty typically, we had it running alongside ICQ and AIM all the time. While we were able to group AIM contacts into categories, a good chunk of our online contacts were more readily available via IRC, and it was easier to contact them there than further clog up our AIM contacts list. More importantly, IRC is a more natural discovery tool, because whoever enters a chat is now within contact distance.¹ AIM was like e-mail in that you had to get someone’s username beforehand, as searching by true name didn’t work. So confusing were people’s usernames that guessing didn’t work either, as like domain names, every good one was taken.

With a dedicated, hacked iOpener running Windows 98 and Trillian, it was easy to keep our comms system up and out of the way, in much the manner an iPhone or iPad works today. If someone needed to reach us and we were home, either of these three methods worked. For deeper discussion, we other tools.

We’ll mention Usenet even though our use of it had already waned ten years ago. Prior to that, we spent a lot more time on various newsgroups, which were ultimately ruined by spam and inactivity. Web-based fora would replace Usenet for most purposes, and we ended up maintaining a presence on several online fora just as we previous inhabited a handful of newsgroups before. By “mainted a presence” we mean that we were active participants and regularly scanned for new threads and discussion topics. In a way, an online forum was more than just a place to seek specific information, but a place to regularly hangout. It was time-consuming to say the least, and the return-on-investment was probably a lot less than the other networks we used. But it worked.

A different picture today.

There’s only one network we heavily relied on 10 years ago that we still use on a daily basis today. These are the networks that, on a daily basis, we use today:

• E-Mail
• SMS / Messages
• Twitter

There’s no way to shirk e-mail. We might argue that it’s become more of a backup communication system for us, but in reality, a lot of our communication is still reliant on this utterly insecure protocol. Looking back, we’re surprised that e-mail encryption never really took off, and that the protocol has remained so simple.

When we got our first smartphone, we played around with an AIM client, but it never maintained our attention. If we sign on to AIM today, it’s a fluke, and IRC is just a fond memory now.² If it weren’t for a very different computer schedule today, we might still use IRC, but it’s a time investment we can no longer regularly afford. The closest thing we have to our old comms trinity is SMS/Messages and Twitter, which serve as reasonable real-time ways to get ahold of us. Arguably, we could get rid of SMS/Messages and use Twitter excusively, but because we have several contacts who don’t maintain a Twitter account, we still field text messages from our less computer-savvy acquaintances.³ In reality, SMS/Messages isn’t exactly a feature we use every single day, but since we technically check for SMS notifications on our mobile devices daily, we’re “using” the protocol.

Since we started our Twitter account, we’ve only used it more and more, and have in many ways reduced the need for e-mail because of it. For example, we’ve found more success in tweeting a company Twitter account with a quick question than waiting for an e-mail response, and messaging a friend is just as simple. The 140-character limit can be annoying, but it also serves to make our messages more concise. The fact that Twitter has direct messaging makes the service very flexible, and the only thing that could make the service substantially better is being able to direct messages to specific lists in addition to publically.

We’re not active on any given web forum anymore, and we rarely lurk on a regular basis even. That said, the online forum is still a go-go place for niche topics, which is somewhat unfortunate as we feel it’s an outdated way to communicate and share ideas.⁴

What’s funny is that with the deluge of social networks available today, we find ourselves torn between what to use, and wishing we could go back to simpler times. But as the above illustrates, our online social life was no less complex back then, but rather more consistent; we’d hunker down on a social network for a lot longer than today, without the concern for privacy that networks like Facebook give us.⁵ And, while we had several networks ringing us in the past, tools like Trillian consolidated them nicely, so it felt like a simpler system. Tools like ifttt help consolidate the networks we use today, but the best form of consolidation in a lot of cases is simply abstinence from unecessary network proliferation in our lives.

Why don’t we use ________?

There was a brief period of time where we’d check Facebook and G+ on a daily basis, but we’ve found our use of these networks has waned. The reasons for this are several, but a major culprit is inconsistent depth to discussions. We may find a very interesting discussion thread one day, but it may not be for another week or two until we find another, and what’s in-between is a bunch of useless text walls that we could care little about. It’s not that the same thing doesn’t happen on Twitter, but at least with a 140-character limit, it’s easier to sift through the chafe, and more often than not, we find something on Twitter worth sending over to Readability for deeper consideration at a later time. Facebook is all about keeping you on Facebook, which only comes across as desperate, and Google’s social app seems very underdeveloped on the iOS side.

While we try to cull our Facebook friends list every couple months, we haven’t yet pulled the trigger on dropping the account entirely. That’s something we’ll hopefully do soon, as we feel it’s the biggest timesink with the least return of the networks we occasionally check in on. While Facebook has a way to restrict messages to only certain groups of friends, we find their mobile implementation is lacking, and the company philosophy not in tune to our own. Facebook is still where a lot of family acquaintances lurk, but the funny thing about Facebook is that people want to be your friend but yet spend no real time actually pursuing conversation with you. We’d sooner replace Facebook entirely with Path for family contacts, assuming others are willing to make the switch; Path’s only downside is that no one is using it, even though the app looks great, works great, and is perfect for communicating with family.

We still believe G+ has a lot of potential, because the Circles implementation feels more natural than Facebook’s lists. The problem with G+ for us is entirely their mobile apps, and the inability to consistently view the desktop version of G+ on the iPad. If Google improves the product in the coming months, we might see our use of this network grow again, but in the meantime it continues to decline.

We’d be interested in hearing how your own online communications have changed over the last decade. Is our experience typical, or have your channels increased in number rather than decreased? Tweet us and let us know.

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The Twitterverse was full of disgust yesterday over the announcement that popular image-sharing service Instagram was purchased by Facebook for a cool $1 billion. Despite both companies offering assurances that Instagram will continue to be developed independently, there’s still potential cause for concern.

Let’s look at where Instagram stood before the buy-out: a popular service among the hipster elite that was, until recently, an iOS exclusive. Instagram was a distant competitor to Facebook as far as online picture sharing goes, but it was nonetheless one with a decent growth curve. The hasty adoption of the recently released Android client illustrated Instagram’s demand perfectly. But, Instagram had no monetization strategy outside of acquisition, and that’s a torch Facebook must now bare.

Facebook has nothing to gain from leaving Instagram as-is, because it leaves them with the same monetization problem Instagram had before the acquisition. With Facebook’s IPO looming ahead, their job is to make money, not buy cool startups because they pose as abstract threat years down the road. Surely, part of Facebook’s acquisition strategy was to mitigate attention loss from the Facebook app to Instagram, but that same strategy needs to account for driving users back to Facebook. That is to say, the value in Instagram isn’t in keeping the service separate from Facebook’s existing services, nor is it purely in absorbing the small fraction of online picture-sharing that Instagram has claim to. Rather, it’s driving as much traffic back to Facebook’s existing portfolio to as possible, and to enrich the overall Facebook experience.

Reading into the recent Facebook and Instagram company statements after the acquisition announcement, we can’t help but think that by “improving” Instagram, Facebook will do whatever it can to inject more Facebook functionality into the Instagram app, be that in the form of check-ins or targeted advertisement. Ultimately, Facebook’s goal will be to add Instagram’s functionality into the Facebook app proper, thereby minimizing a user’s need to use both apps.¹ We wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook’s goal is to require Instagram users to have a Facebook account for logging into Instagram in the future, thus solidifying the integration between apps. Either way, Facebook’s emphasis will be on their core product, not in leaving Instagram as-is; Facebook bought Instagram for the data, and will undoubtedly use that data outside of the Instagram app. How they’ll leverage user photos in other areas should become evident in the coming months, but rest assured Facebook already has a monetization strategy for their Instagram acquisition, and that strategy will neatly tie in to their existing products.

Some critics are doubting Zuckerberg’s clear-headedness with the acquisition, and that he over-estimated Instagram’s worth. That’s partially true, considering Instagram was assessed at $500 million only a short time prior to the acquisition. But Facebook clearly saw not only Instagram’s growth potential, but also a successful mobile app built around sharing. You can argue that Facebook should have been able to build a reasonable competitor, but we all know how utterly crappy Facebook’s mobile apps have been to date. And, perhaps more importantly, there’s unseen value in the mindshare of Instagram. Despite all the kids swearing Instagram off because of the acquisition, how many will truly stop using their beloved social networking client? Even if Instagram loses a chunk of users due to the acquisition, those who remain loyal to Instagram will at minimum remain neutral to their new Facebook overlords, and in some ways, that’s a positive thing for a company that’s been ridiculed by the geek savvy for constantly shitting on user privacy.

Instagram is also a social network of a sort different from Facebook’s core offering, in that Facebook was built around reconnecting with old acquaintances and those in your real-world networks. Instagram’s photo sharing mechanism means users follow random individuals based purely on the aesthetic value of what they share, and that’s a very different beast from how Facebook has operated to date. Yet, it’s clearly a space Facebook wants to continue moving in, as it captures a networking angle that simply following friends, companies, and celebrities doesn’t.

The clear takeaway however is that Instagram will compliment Facebook, not the other way around. It may be too soon to jump from Instagram’s ship since we don’t know exactly how things will play out, but you’re fooling yourself to think the Instagram experience, sandboxed as it currently is, will remain intact.² Fortunately, there are several options to replace Instagram, both in contained apps like PicPlz, as well as combination tools like Twitter and Hipstamatic;³ whatever disappointment we have in giving up Instagram doesn’t create a void we can’t fill.

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Pinterest has been around for awhile, but in the past couple months it’s gotten considerable online press as the up-and-coming social network. Unsurprisingly, it was just a matter of time before someone found something wrong with the service. If it’s trendy to bash Facebook, why not the new guy on the block?

Alyson Shontell at SFGate tells the story of lawyer and Pinterest user Kirsten, who looked over Pinterest’s terms-of-service (TOS), and quickly shut down her Pinterest account:

She browsed Pinterest’s Terms of Use section. In it she found Pinterest’s members are solely responsible for what they pin and repin. They must have explicit permission from the owner to post everything.

It’s not surprising that Pinterest wants to protect itself as best as possible, but it sounds like the TOS is ignoring fair use in this clause, and is taking the most conservative route possible. Still, Kirsten looked up the fair use clause, and Shontell reported accordingly:

Copyrighted work can only be used without permission when someone is criticizing it, commenting on it, reporting on it, teaching about it, or conducting research. Repinning doesn’t fall under any of those categories.

This is where we disagree; Kirsten herself calls Pinterest an “inspiration board”, which is just another way of saying it’s a “research reference”. When you look at how Pinterest is generally used, it’s to collect information for future projects, current projects, and things users like. In effect, it’s hitting every one of the points Shontell notes: users criticize and comment on things they pin; users report on the things they find; users teach their followers about what they like; and users research projects and log the results on their boards.

Kirsten goes on to assume that the whole affair can only be resolved based on the outcome of Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, which involved a photographer who sued a search engine. The search engine won because it used thumbnail images, not the original work in its entirety.

Thumbnails aren’t always fair use, however. They’re only fair use if the necessary portion of the work is copied and nothing more. Pinterest, however, lifts the entire image from the original source which is not ok.

Pinterest doesn’t lift an entire source either, however. Admittedly, it may be different for photography-specific boards, but the majority of Pinterest users are lifting single images from articles that link back to the source article.¹

Kirsten’s later concern is the TOS section on legal responsibility, which Shontell summarizes:

Basically, if a photographer sues you for pinning an image illegally on Pinterest, the user must not only pay for his or her lawyer, they must also pay for Pinterest’s lawyer. In addition, the defendant must pay all charges against him or herself, along with all of Pinterest’s charges.

We have to wonder how relevant this even is. In most legal cases involving online copyright infringement, the “infringer” is sent a legal letter asking them to take the copyrighted work down. This section is basically saying that if you don’t take it down and decide to go to court, Pinterest will not pay relevant legal fees. That sounds pretty reasonable, and if you get this kind of letter, it’s probably unreasonable to bother with the kind of legal escapades that such action will result in.

Kirsten likens Pinterest to Napster as an enabler of illegal activity. It wasn’t just Napster that went down — 12 year old girls who downloaded music were sued too.

Likening Pinterest to Napster is where Kirsten’s argument entirely breaks down and turns to complete folly; Pinterest isn’t sharing anything that’s not already available on the web from the source, nor is it selling anything. If you’re a photographer and release a picture on the web, why would you complain that it’s posted on another site that links back to your own?

When we thought about Kirsten’s complaints, we read her original piece on it, and then had a sudden realization: Kirsten doesn’t explain the initial use of Pinterest that her Facebook-using photographer pals were taking issue with. All we know is that some photographers on Facebook were complaining that their works were showing up on Pinterest without their permission.

If a copyright holder is arguing that their real-life works are showing up on Pinterest because someone, say, photographed their painting, uploaded it to the web, and linked to it on Pinterest, that’s another thing entirely. Obviously that’s a real issue, and one where legal action is reasonable.

That’s quite a different issue than an artist over at Deviant Art complaining that the painting they posted to online is now linked to from Pinterest also. We’re rather surprised Kirsten didn’t clear this up in her original post, because it totally changes the perpective of her legal concerns.²

Ultimately, there’s no argument here compelling enough to shut down your Pinterest boards, yet. At best, this sounds like a misunderstanding surrounded by paranoia, and at worst an unhealthy dose of fear-mongering.

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When we pre-ordered the new iPad last week, we opted to stick with AT&T for data coverage, despite our recent complaint about AT&T’s misguided crack-down on unlimited data plan subscribers. Several other people we follow on the internets have switched preorders from the AT&T offering to Verizon, but there are several reasons we decided to stick with our initial decision.

Ease of transfer.

When we moved from the original iPad to the iPad 2, keeping our data service was a simple matter of swapping out SIM cards. It may not be a big deal to ensure our existing iPad data plan is canceled, and a new one activated on Verizon in its place, but why bother with this if it’s not necessary? Verizon’s data plans aren’t any cheaper than AT&T’s are, unless you opt for the 10GB/month option,¹ leaving LTE availability as the only compelling reason to move to Verizon.

Unlimited data.

Granted, it apparently means nothing anymore, but we’re still grandfathered in to AT&T’s unlimited data plan. AT&T should take note that this was a factor, albeit an incredibly minor one, in keeping a subscriber on their network. A tiny part of us hopes that AT&T won’t throttle speeds at the full 95% bandwidth that some have reported in the event we ever do exceed 3GB/month, and if they don’t, perhaps this is a small reason to stick with AT&T.

Poor LTE availability.

For people living in certain cities, the Verizon option may be a no-brainer, because Verizon currently has better LTE coverage overall. However, both providers have pretty poor LTE coverage outside of major cities, so most people don’t really have the option to get LTE in the first place. If you live in a city where only one provider has an offering, that’s obviously the provider you want, but for everyone else, it’s a toss-up as far as coverage goes.

Personally, we don’t live in an LTE-available area, so there’s no compelling reason to switch to Verizon. Of the cities we’ll likely visit more than once this year, there’s LTE available from both carriers, so again, no reason to switch to Verizon.

AT&T’s 3G+ speeds.

Many people are annoyed over the fact that Apple caved and gives a “4G” moniker to 3G data speeds on AT&T’s network, for those who have a newer iPhone. Technically speaking, the 4G label here isn’t indicating that the iPhone is running on a 4G data network (as that’s what the “LTE” label would indicate), so why did AT&T push for this?

Yes, it’s a marketing gimmick, though AT&T’s 3G offering is faster than Verizon’s in certain areas, and that’s what the “4G” label indicates. So while it’s nowhere near as fast as LTE is, in areas where LTE isn’t available, you’ll default to the 3G offering, which in AT&T’s case, is faster than Verizon’s offering.

Since we don’t live in an area where LTE is available, we’ll be doing all our non-wifi surfing over 3G, or in this case, the faster “4G” that AT&T offers. If you’re in a similar case, there’s no reason to choose Verizon unless you simply don’t get AT&T service in your area.²

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When the original iPad was released, the 3G version was exclusive to AT&T. Among the data plans offered was an “unlimited” plan that ran for $29.99/month. This plan has since been deprecated; if you bought an iPad after the plan was discontinued, you have to opt for a limited bandwidth tier, while those who had the option for the unlimited plan before are grandfathered in. Today, the largest data plan available through AT&T is 3GB/month, with additional bandwidth costing extra.¹ Conveniently, the 3GB plan also costs $29.99/month.

The controversy with the unlimited plan is that AT&T has threatened to throttle bandwidth for unlimited plan subscribers for quite some time. Reports have been varied, and customers wanted a clarification of the rule. Recently, AT&T provided this clarification, stating they would throttle bandwidth for all unlimited plan subscribers after 3GB of bandwidth is consumed in a given month. Once the next billing cycle begins anew, the throttle would be removed, and customers would be back to full-speed data transfers. AT&T’s argument is that they want to ensure that a minority of users are not placing undue burden on the network for the majority, but as Hot Hardware points out, that’s not really the case:

First, AT&T’s bandwidth throttle is based solely on a person’s usage, not their location or the overall demand for bandwidth at any given time. In reality, this is never the case. At 5PM in a downtown metropolitan area, cellular bandwidth will be at an absolute premium — a graveyard shift worker in one of the office buildings at 3 AM has no way to saturate the available spectrum, even if they had a dozen phones.

In other words, AT&T is finding a convenient excuse (that doesn’t hold much water) to charge their early iPad-adopting customers more money than they were initially led to believe. If these customers choose not to switch plans and pony up for more bandwidth in the event they exceed 3GB/month, AT&T throttles the customer’s networks speed by as much as 95%, effectively making the data connection useless.² AT&T is still technically providing unlimited bandwidth to the customer, only it’s at incredibly low speeds.

An iPhone user in California recently won a small claims court judgement for $850 over this throttling fiasco³, and I would be surprised if others don’t take similar legal actions. Not everyone sees the small claims court victory just, however, like Dan Frommer:

Please get over your emotional battle — and extinguish any legal threats, that’s silly — and join us in reality. If you use a lot of mobile data, be happy about it, and be happy paying for it.

Dan’s argument is just as emotional as the argument of those asking that “unlimited” mean “unlimited bandwidth at maximum speed”; Dan accuses unlimited subscribers of whining, but then whines about how we’re all hurting his precious network. But as Hot Hardware points out, high-bandwidth users aren’t necessarily adversely affecting the network; for AT&T to justly throttle a user’s speeds, the burden of proof needs to be on them to show that a user’s network use was affecting the network in a negative way, but they’re not doing that. The reality is AT&T trying to underhandedly change the terms of its original $29.99/month plan by convincing the majority of its customers that they would be negatively impacted otherwise.

The assumption Dan makes (and those who back him in this) is not just that unlimited-plan subscribers are hammering network speeds for everyone else, but that they’re consistently using more than 3GB of data each month. To our knowledge, AT&T hasn’t provided any evidence of this either, and from an anecdotal perspective, we don’t believe this to be the case; we’ve been on the unlimited plan since pretty much day one, and most months, don’t come close to reaching 3GB.⁴ We may never exceed the 3GB cap each month, and if we have, it’s incredibly rare. This means that most months, we pay more than what we use, and would be surprised to hear it’s much different for many other unlimited plan subscribers. In effect, we’re putting more into the network than the average consumer, and so if we happen to exceed the 3GB cap one month, shouldn’t we morally be allowed to get away with it? Maybe Dan should be thanking us instead of calling us whiners.

AT&T has a rollover minutes plan for their cell phones, which seems reasonably fair: if you don’t use all your minutes in a given month, the surplus will be added to your next month’s minutes (to a limit) for you to use later. Maybe AT&T should do something like this for data. But that would be fair.

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Brent Simmons was one of many who commented earlier today on OS X Mountain Lion removing RSS reading from Mail and Safari. The move makes sense when one considers parity between OS X and iOS apps, in that the latter do not offer such features. But more importantly, these features are typically unused by most OS X users, who, if they review RSS feeds at all, typically have either a dedicated reader, else use a web app like Google Reader.

Worth noting is that people didn’t use Mail/Safari for RSS reading because the experience was shit. Apple seemed to add these capabilitie as an afterthought, and not because it was deemed particularly useful. We’ve used Google Reader for years because the experience is relatively consistent across browsers, and because there are numerous third-party apps for iOS that integrate with the service. However, given Google’s evilness of late, we’d happily consider an alternative if there was one, but right now, there simply isn’t. What do we mean by “an alternative”?

• Ability to access feeds via the web to read and modify.
• Native apps for iPhone and iPad that offer all the functionality of the web version.
• Synchronization.

It’s really not asking much, and we’re rather surprised that Google Reader is the only option out there. We’d even be willing to pay for this service if it had third-party extensions, like being able to leverage social networks, OmniFocus, Instapaper, etc.¹ Presumably, Apple doesn’t want to take this project on because the average Apple user doesn’t know or care about RSS.

We’ve looked into options like Fever, but we’re not a fan of self-hosted options if we can avoid it, and it seems Mobile Safari still leaves something to be desired for viewing one’s Fever feeds.

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Over the past several weeks we’ve explored a way to simplify our blogging workflow. While we’ve used WordPress for years, we find the process of getting a blog entry published somewhat cumbersome. Admittedly, it’s not WordPress inherently, but more on how we use WordPress, or more accurately, the manner in which we self-constrained our blogging paradigm. For most users, WordPress entries are a matter of loading up their blog via a browser of choice, and then drafting an entry within the WordPress admin panel. Basically, a post from beginning to end is all done in the browser. Since we migrated to an iPad-centric paradigm, however, this doesn’t work for us, because WordPress doesn’t play well in Mobile Safari.

For awhile, we juggled this limitation by utilizing native apps, but the results were mixed. The WordPress app could post a new entry, for example, but couldn’t alter a post’s slug or set other post parameters. It’s also a very unstable app that’s prone to crashing. We tried several blogging apps that work with WordPress, but these were all either similarly unstable, or added unnecessary HTML formatting into our posts. When we began writing in Markdown, we decided to compose posts in a text editor (usually Simplenote) and then cut’n paste into the WordPress app, or paste into the WordPress interface in Mobile Safari.¹ Neither option was particularly lengthy, but neither option was particularly efficient, either. Simplenote gave us the freedom that cloud-enabled apps bring, as we could work on a piece anywhere and from any device we own, but getting the post online involved additional steps.

Our annoyance with this workflow was further burdened by our dislike of general complexity. Self-hosted WordPress provides several benefits, but it also adds additional burdens. Sometime in December, we started to look into baked blogs², a trend that began among some techie bloggers earlier in 2011. The idea of a baked blog is to save posts in plain-text (written using Markdown or similar), and then having a minimalist blogging engine convert the text files into HTML. Such a blogging engine uses templates, so site design is usually constrained to a handful of files (e.g. an index, an archive, a post page, and an associated CSS). In this manner, one’s blog is never stored in a database, and article retrievals are therefore expedited and less CPU intensive. Obviously, baked blogs aren’t as modular as dynamic systems that can use plugins and execute code, but with HTML5 and CSS3, there’s actually a lot that can be done design-wise on a baked blog. But more importantly, it’s the simplicity of baked blogs that make them appealing, and why we explored them in a desire to move mendax.org in this direction.

Unfortunately, while there are several merits behind baked blogs, there are also complications. For one, the blogging engine compiling the post files needs to reside on a computer that’s always on. In a typical setup, post files are stored on a desktop, or accessible by a desktop using something like Dropbox, and then the converted HTML files are either served to the web via a local web server, or pushed to a server somewhere else.³ This intermediary requirement makes the system wholly unsuited for our iPad-centric paradigm.⁴

One option would be to not rely on a cloud service like Dropbox, and instead copy text files written on the iPad over to a web server via FTP, and have the blogging engine run there. This is a reasonable solution, but it’s still more complex than what we’re aiming for. After all, such a system would be no quicker to post to than the one we’re currently constrained to using WordPress.

The new breed of hosted Dropbox blogging engines.

When we stumbled upon Scriptogram and Skrivr, we thought we finally found an elegant solution. Both platforms are hosted baked blogging services that tie into Dropbox. This means you can use any text editor that can access a specific Dropbox folder, and after formatting the file appropriately⁵, the post gets published to your blog. Both are great systems that are in their infancy, and both allow a degree of customization that services like Calepin do not, like being able to edit the site’s HTML and CSS templates for custom layouts.⁶

A definitive advantage of Skrivr is that it stores the HTML and CSS templates server-side along with posts.⁷ This means that you can use any Dropbox enabled text editor to tweak your blog’s layout. Unfortunately, Skrivr currently requires complete access to your Dropbox account, instead of to just one folder. Hopefully this will change in the future, but for the time being, it means security-conscious users will want to create a second Dropbox account for Skrivr’s use.⁸ Second, the out-of-box themes for Skrivr populate a drop-down menu linking to old posts, so you can imagine what happens when you have dozens of posts. Skrivr desperately needs a better way to handle archives, and while we’re sure this is in the works, it’s currently a major downside to the service for bloggers who post frequently. Skrivr also utilizes categories, which the included themes are designed to use. While there may be some SEO advantages to employing categories, we find them rather unnecessary for our purposes, and so we don’t want our blogging tool to require them.

As far as transparency of development goes, Skrivr has had fewer updates from its developer(s) than Scriptogram has, and that’s surely holding back adoption. It looks to be shaping up well, but at this point, there are enough rough edges to the system that we feel it best to hold off before we employ it full steam.

Whereas Skrivr automatically scans its Dropbox folder for updates, Scriptogram does not, and relies on the philosophy that bloggers should have to manually assert their will to post a new article. Practically speaking, this means that users must go to the service’s web interface and press the “Synchronize” button before blog changes are processed. This is somewhat ironic, in that the service is supposed to foster the notion that bloggers can simply get away with using a text editor and a Dropbox account, but the reality is that they still need to rely on a web browser. This in itself wouldn’t be too cumbersome of a process if it weren’t for the fact that synchronization is not particularly quick after many posts are stored in the Dropbox folder. We tested this by migrating over 400 posts from mendax.org to a Scriptogram-linked Dropbox account, and the biggest flaw in the process was the long synchronization time. Per the developer, the system only looks for modifications to files and doesn’t re-sync the whole folder, but this still isn’t a particularly quick process, and the last thing we want to do is stare at our browser window for minutes after we write a new post. Ideally, if we have to click on a button to synchronize our posts, the button would merely tell a process to run server-side, such that we can immediately close our browser tab and move on.

Both services don’t currently support nested file hierarchies in Dropbox, which means that navigating the folder containing all your posts is slow. At least two Dropbox-enabled writing apps we downloaded couldn’t handle displaying 400+ files in a single folder, so kept crashing. The two apps that did work for us were Nebulous Notes and iA Writer, but we found that their flaw was when we lost our internet connection: we could create or edit a file regardless of where it was in our Dropbox account, but if we lost our internet connection and tried to list our Dropbox files or start a new document, the old one was lost. For a service like Scriptogram or Skrivr to work well, there needs to be a text editor that will maintain recently-viewed files locally so their changes won’t be lost. Otherwise, you need to create files locally, and then move them into the Dropbox folder later, which is a less elegant solution.⁹ Scriptogram will have a native iOS app in the future, so perhaps this problem is already considered, but for now, it means neither service is as frictionless as they would seem if your internet access isn’t always-on.

Both Scriptogram and Skrivr are still in “beta”, so their growing pains are to be expected. We have no doubt that these platforms will evolve nicely in the coming weeks and months, but until they play a bit friendlier with the iPad, they’re currently better services for those using conventional computers.

What of Tumblr and Posterous?

When we decided to wait a bit to see how Scriptogram and Skrivr shape up, we caught wind of David Chartier’s migration to Tumblr. We never gave the service much interest in the past, but on David’s recommendation, we explored it a bit more thoroughly. Tumblr is of course free, and while some folks on the web complain that it suffers more downtime than other blog hosts, it’s really not that bad.¹⁰ Tumblr natively supports Markdown, which immediately makes it an attractive choice, and the third-party Tumblr iOS app Tumblita means posting on-the-go is easy.¹¹ Layout is customize-able, though Tumblr has the same problem here that Scriptogram does, in that the only way to edit the blog’s template files is to use the system’s respective web editor, which is not iPad friendly. This means to make layout changes, you still need to rely on a conventional computer, which we’re not fond of. Another annoyance with these systems is that starting a template from scratch isn’t intuitive, particularly in Tumblr’s case. You can modify the HTML of an existing theme, but creating one from a blank template leaves a lot to be desired.

The nice thing about Tumblr is that it has a strong community, so options for pre-built themes are considerable. Because of how the system shares tags across all hosted blogs, it’s easy for other Tumblr users to stumble across your blog. The downside is that in exchange for this readership boost, SEO isn’t as easy as with a self-hosted solution, because even though you may decide to use a custom domain, your content is still tied to the tumblr.com domain as well.¹²

Of course, Tumblr isn’t as clean a system as a baked blog, but it’s a decent alternative for those who want a pretty quick blogging workflow with basic functionality for various post types. It’s a bit overkill for mendax.org because we don’t rely much on non-text content, and we still prefer easy access to post text files. This means that even with Tumblr, we’d end up cut’n pasting content from our text app into Tumblr, Tumblina, or Mail. When we want to edit a post to make changes, the workflow becomes unnecessarily complicated.

Posterous is not very different from Tumblr, and is arguably its chief competitor. We looked into the service to see how it stands up, and while it doesn’t feel as sexy as Tumblr, it’s just as powerful. That said, Posterous does offer a couple things that Tumblr doesn’t, including a way to import posts from other platforms into Posterous, as well as a custom HTML/CSS editor that can actually be modified from Mobile Safari. Posterous charges for custom domain setup on an annual basis, and the mobile app seems a bit more stable than the first-party Tumblr app. For supposed security reasons, Posterous also doesn’t support javascript, which is a blow against it. Neither Tumblr or Posterous seem very flexible when it comes to displaying posts, unless you’re willing to really dig into the APIs.

So what’s the ideal system?

In the end, the system we want doesn’t exist. This dilemma has prompted other folks to write their own homebrew apps, and a quick web search will uncover dozens of baked blogging engines written in almost any web-friendly language you can think of. The problem is that these are all designed to work with conventional computers, and not mobile devices. This means there’s a clear niche for a developer to step in and create a solid, frictionless blogging engine for iOS and Android, with the following features:

1. Text file storage in the cloud for posts and template files, whether it’s Dropbox or another service.
2. Markdown support.
3. Ability to cache posts offline.
4. Text file to HTML converter, nicely packaged as an iOS/Android app, which pushes the final blog to a web server.

We’ve seen at least one Objective-C based engine that could potentially be ported to iOS, but the developer has no apparent plans to do so. As more bloggers rely on tablets to get content online, however, the demand for more streamlined blogging solutions on iOS and Android will undoubtedly increase. The upcoming Scriptogram iOS app seems to have the most potential to fulfill our criteria, but in the meantime, we’ll stick with WordPress and keep looking.

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The basic version of OnLive Desktop is already available, which leverages OnLive’s streaming video technology to let an iPad connect to a remote server running Windows. The idea is to give iPad owners access to native Microsoft Office products, and later expand this access to other devices (tablets and PCs alike). So without actually buying a personal copy of Microsoft Office, you can access a copy on OnLive’s servers, and thanks to fast video streaming technology, it’s almost as though you’re running it locally.

We tried out the OnLive Desktop when it was first released,¹ and were impressed by its snappiness and image quality. The technology used in this app is based off the video streaming technology OnLive has worked on for its gaming product, which streams video of PC games. For us, the Desktop streaming worked much better than traditional OnLive streaming, though both perform well considering everything’s remote. Unfortunately, there’s not much to do on OnLive Desktop yet, unless Microsoft Office apps are what you need. The free OnLive Desktop app gives you 2GB of cloud storage (proprietary to OnLive), which you can access via a web browser, too. There aren’t any other apps on the system, however.

Fortunately, that should change with the release of OnLive Desktop Pro, which runs $9.99/month and, in addition to more cloud storage, gives you access to more PC apps. It’s not yet clear whether these are pre-installed apps or if OnLive will somehow white-list or black-list apps that can or can’t be installed, but there’s a lot of potential here that we hope OnLive takes advantage of. Here’s our list of wants for this service:

1. Hopefully, OnLive Desktop Pro will not limit users to a set number of pre-installed apps. That’s because we can’t envision most apps that OnLive curators choose to be very appealing, as most of our daily computing tasks are already met. This means that the apps we would want to see are likely very niche, so we’d sooner see OnLive implement a black-list of apps that can’t be installed than a small list of apps that can. For example, OnLive would obviously ban malware, as well as apps that simply don’t make sense for the service, like Steam.² P2P apps, porn, et al would likely be part of such a blacklist as well.

2. OnLive’s cloud solution may work for some people, but since it’s not integrated with other apps we use, it’s a bit extraneous. We’d sooner see integration with Dropbox, which works with an enormous number of apps. If such integration isn’t native, then Dropbox will hopefully still be an approved add-on.

3. Fast-app switching is a must for OnLive Desktop. Right now, if you leave the app and switch back, you have to connect to the service all over again. We’d sooner see the connection maintained for a short amount of time, such that we can perform a task in another app and return to OnLive Desktop without delay. We have this same problem with Splashtop Remote, and it’s a real workflow obstruction.

4. Windows is nice and all, but how about OS X access? A virtual OS X desktop instead of a Windows one would be super-helpful for many, especially those clinging on to their Macs just for one or two apps. It’d also be great for those seeking to develop on the Mac/iOS/iBookstore, but don’t readily have a Mac handy because their main development is for Windows/Android/ePub.

The possibilities are huge if these things are integrated, and not just for hobbyists. Developers could work on apps for a given platform without buying a dedicated machine, being able to access remote IDEs and compilers for platforms they don’t already own. We’d love to tinker with mobile development, but don’t relish the idea of buying a computer just for that purpose, as we’re able to do everything else with our iPad. At $9.99/month, it”d totally be worth the $119.88/year for easy access to a virtual development box, and I doubt we’re alone in that boat.

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We’ve thrown this around in our head for some time now, and we finally decided to pull the trigger and disable site comments. There was no particular event that forced us to do this, and we weren’t encumbered by moderation problems like much larger sites are. So why bother nixing comments?

Over the past several weeks, we read various opinions across the blogosphere on commenting, and we decided that we agreed with the camp that many single-author sites fall into, which sounds something like this: “This is our blog, and if you want your own voice, comment on your blog.” It’s not a matter of control, or humbleness, but rather a philosophical stance that we believe harbors more useful commentary and discussion.

For one, mendax.org doesn’t get a lot of commentary to begin with. Of the commentary it does get, a good percentage is from people we’re already familiar with, who we already follow on Twitter, or Google Plus, or simply know in real life. Those people can just as easily comment using any of these networks, and we can easily comment back. The rest of the individuals who want to comment probably use one of these social networks also, so it’s easy for them to utilize these networks to comment here if they so choose.

Of the remaining individuals who choose not to have a social networking account, and still want to comment, there’s always e-mail. This should cut down on the number of non-productive comments we get, as feedback that’s direct (either via an @WyldKard at Twitter, else a direct e-mail) tends to be more constructive.

Two, we believe that a lot of useful information sometimes gets lost in a site’s comments. We’ve felt this when leaving commentary elsewhere, and we took a stance some time back that, if we have a real position worth leaving a comment for, we’d sooner write about it at mendax.org and give a link back to the post we’re commenting on. Not only does this help drive traffic to the person we’re commenting to, but it tends to make our response more thought out.

In a way, we liken this to the back-and-forth that philosophers and scientists had yesteryear, which was by way of letter. This slow, almost tedious approach provided both detailed thoughts, as well as a more three-dimensional banter between parties. The same can be done across blogs thanks to trackbacks and tweets, as a more detailed picture of the involved parties can be drawn in the context of their own blogs. As a bonus, this fosters a more personal exchange, and therefore, one less prone to personal attacks.

Three, our own comments to our posts often get lost over time, when a detailed response to a reader could just as easily become its own post. We believe it makes more sense to flush such responses out as a new entry, than to minimize its importance to our position in a sub-comment.

Four, the decision follows a more minimalist approach.The site is simpler, and in our opinion, cleaner because of it. No longer do we need to worry about whether our anti-spam plugins are working, and no longer do we need to worry about catching a comment alert via e-mail, or in WordPress’ admin section. Rather, we can rely on notifications we check for other purposes daily, and be better engaged with our audience. From a plugin perspective, it also means there’s less WordPress needs to handle, and less load the server needs to provide.¹

We’re not necessarily attached to this change long-term, but would like to try it out to see how well it fosters discussion and cross-linking over the near future. If it doesn’t seem to be working out, we can always go back, but this change seems right for what we envision the site to be.

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The last several years have shown us the demise of retail giants like Circuit City and CompUSA. In a way, the birth of these big-box retailers was out of necessity: electronics and computers were typically too complicated for the average consumer to research without help from knowledgeable salespeople. On Monday, Larry Downes at Forbes wrote a piece on Best Buy’s recent disappointing earnings announcement, and how Best Buy may soon go the way of the dodo as well.¹

With the flop of 3D televisions and the expansion of Apple’s own retail locations, there was no killer product on the horizon that would lift it from the doldrums.

The problem isn’t with a lack of compelling hardware, or even Apple’s rise.² Rather, it’s entirely about a lack of customer service. Forbes addresses this by discussing the annoying up-selling and cross-selling that salespeople are required to try, but that’s not the main problem. It’s the education.

It doesn’t take much to become a retail employee at one of these stores. Your average Best Buy is staffed by teenagers and college kids trying to earn a bit of pocket change. Occasionally you’ll find someone who’s been selling TVs for the last ten years and knows the brands and tech and usability of each option quite well, but how often does that happen? How often is the basis of hiring an employee to truly understand the products they’re selling, and educate them about the products over the course of their employment?

On our last trip to Best Buy, we eyed the integrated Bose surround sound systems offered. There were three. Between two salesmen, neither could tell us the extent of the differences between systems, and the prices were no better than what we could get from Bose directly. Neither salesman could offer suggestions on comparable equipment, both agreeing that “Bose is the best”.³ When we asked a question they couldn’t answer, they looked on Best Buy’s web site.

Here’s the thing: we can go online, too, and we do.⁴ As a kid, when our father wanted to shop for a piece of electronics, we’d drive down to the local electronics store where we were greeted by grown men who knew the products they sold inside and out. They didn’t have to consult a big book to determine what options a given company had, or what a particular device could or could not do. They knew these answers because it was their job, and in order to do their job well, they had to stay educated about their trade. That quality is lost these days, and it’s easier and quicker for us to do some online research and make a purchase on the web than it is to get shoddy information from a kid who only knows to get on Best Buy’s web page for more information about what they sell.

Don’t think we’re singling out Best Buy, here. The same is true wherever we go these days. Pride in knowing your product is left to very niche, small outlets.[^4] A local Starbucks barista didn’t know the definition of “fair trade coffee”. A Target employee in the cell phone area didn’t know what Jawbone was, or what the display of the Jawbone Up was for. If your employees don’t know their product, then they’re failures. And you are too.

We’re reminded of the magical Macy’s from Miracle on 34th Street, which ended up formalizing a policy to direct buyers to exactly what they were looking for even if Macy’s itself didn’t have it. Nowadays, retail employees can’t do this, because they barely even know their own, in-house products. But maybe the decline of big retailers will increase the gaps that smaller, niche retailers can fit. Looking to put a home theater system together remains a confusing endeavor, and there’s still opportunity for small retailers in this space. Growing that expertise into something profitable, however, will be a challenge, especially given the low salaries most salespeople are forced to cope with.

As for Best Buy, we won’t miss ‘em.

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