• – More Google services combining into Google+ (YouTube and Reader’s social features)
• – Google+ coming to Google Apps
• – A promise to permit pseudonyms
• – A leaked preview of a new more social-ized interface for Gmail
• + Word from Gwibber (and therefore may more such services) plan in their next version to support Google+

There are more changes I think, but these were the ones that I found interesting to me as end-user. Obviously Google have managed to see where they want to go and put all their efforts and considerable money behind it. I think that this kind of vision-directed, unified strategy may succeed in winning over users. They are, more than Facebook, the new Microsoft, in that they can offer best all-round solutions. So far, they have proven less arrogant and more generous than Microsoft, but this may be a trait of our times, where even the biggest companies appreciate that it is easy to dethrone them. Their efforts to create a unified Google cyberspace is clearly intended to create user lock-in. But so far their lock-in has been simply by providing some of the best services out there. Gmail is the best email program; Google’s search engine is the best, Reader the best RSS aggregator, and there are a few other services in which they arguably provide the best solution.

As an end-user who is interested in breaking the monopoly of big companies, and finding non-commercial, non-proprietary substitutes, I wonder whether Google will manage to provide services that I feel I can’t live without, and at the same time manage not to be “too evil” in the way they offer them? There were years when I felt that there was no reasonable substitute for Microsoft, and I used their software while feeling bad about it. I’ve never felt quite as bad about Google, but I’m still aware of their enormity and power. Their potential for misusing these is already significant.

In ancient times, one of the worst possible punishments that could be meted out was excommunication from one’s church or banishment from the city. Sometime in the future, a parallel punishment could be banning from Google of Facebook.

I’m using a Blackberry Pearl 9105, which I’ve seen described as “not quite” a Blackberry or “half” a Blackberry because it doesn’t have a full keyboard. It’s not a bad phone, and I like that it looks more like a normal phone while actually being a “smartphone”. But there are a lot of unsmart things about it. One of them is that there is no automatic locking mechanism, although such a phone really requires it. You can lock the keys, of course, but you forget. And every time you answer a call, you have to lock them again.

After lots of googling and manual reading, a few months ago, I understood that a work-around could be to use a password lock. I was using this, but it’s cumbersome. So tonight I decided to look in the Blackberry World store for something easier. Aside from the fact that it shouldn’t really be necessary to hunt for software for a program that ought to have been in the phone from the first place, it’s quite daunting to start a research project on something so trivial as a keyboard lock. But you really need to. There are different prices and functions. Not every application suits every Blackberry. I discovered this by paying a dollar for an application (SliderLock, by Ajani) that simply doesn’t work on my phone, although Blackberry World says it does. But it depends on an Alt key – touch-slide mechanism to open, and my particular Blackberry doesn’t have an Alt key. Now, Blackberry says that to simulate the “Alt” function on this phone you have to (incredibly) press the right-side volume keys in an “UP-DOWN-UP-DOWN-UP” sequence. Now why didn’t I think of that? Instead, it took me 45 minutes to google. Anyhow, that didn’t work either for SliderLock. So let’s look for another application… Eventually, after debating whether to fork out a further $3 for a different company’s keyboard lock, I find there is actually one going for FREE. Jared Company have a nice “Slide2Open” app that’s absolutely free, doesn’t have tacky publicity nags and does exactly what I want. Perfect. I download and install it, and it works fine.

The lack of an auto keyboard lock isn’t the only crazy thing about the Pearl 9105. If an application – like SliderLock for example – misbehaves and makes it impossible to use your phone, there’s nothing to do but re-start it. They actually call it to “Reset” the phone. I initially thought might be a method to wipe all my data and return the phone to its factory condition. Okay, so restart the phone. Now how do I do that? A long press on the the On switch? another sequence of key presses on the volume button? But, as I quickly discovered (no let’s be honest, s-l-o-w-l-y discovered, through Google again), there is actually no easy way to reset the Blackberry Pearl 9105.

What you have to do is open the back cover, remove and return the battery then put the cover back. And then wait a few minutes: strange that a phone should take longer to boot up than a computer. Also good that you don’t have to unscrew the back cover of your laptop and remove the battery every time you want to do a restart. However, there’s a solution. Since Blackberry didn’t see fit to include a reset mechanism for their phone, you go looking for that on Blackberry World. Fortunately, again I was able to find a free application. It’s called (don’t laugh) QuickPull, because it simulates the action of pulling out the battery.

I’m a patient kind of fellow, and eventually sort out how to deal with my gadgets. But I know that Blackberry’s favourite target audience is “busy professionals”. So how do they put up with this stuff? Presumably they actually have lots of time on their hands while waiting at airports.

Blackberry customers in Europe and the Middle East were recently inconvenienced due to an outage in the company’s server at Slough. In fact, all the customers’ internets and messaging services disappeared into a slimy slough. In the Gulf States, where Blackberries are popular, the news media recorded a significant drop in road accidents due to drivers inability to send text messages from their cars. By way of recompense, Blackberry will be giving away many of the paid applications in Blackberry World for free. I’ve never actually bought an application there besides SliderLock, but I’m thrilled. One of the applications being given away is “DriveSafe.ly”, which reads all your text messages out-loud when you need to stay focused on navigating through traffic in Pearl Square.

I continue to follow the fortunes of the alternative social networks even though I’m not sociable enough to invest much effort in any of them. Status.net has had a major upgrade, and now its free public service known as Identi.ca has acquired an elegant and unique design, which doesn’t look like it is parroting any other social-networking interface. It is also highly usable and useful: conversations are grouped together, images can be viewed inline, and the ability to follow interest tags works very nicely. Status.net have a business model similar to that of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, offering a free service (in Identi.ca), free downloadable software + a paid enterprise service.

Friendika is probably the network with the greatest potential in that it’s already full of features and continues to accumulate more. Its ambitions go far beyond just being a social network. At present, despite a variety of themes, it still lacks the finished look of Status.net or Diaspora. The Friendika server that I’m using is also annnoyingly sluggish: because it tries to pull in data from a variety of sources, Friendika apparently makes above-average demands on a server. I’ve no idea how Friendika’s developers pay their bills and keep the project afloat, but they do. It’s just not getting the attention it deserves.

Diaspora which, like Friendika, is intended to be a distributed social-network, is now offering invites to its central server. It’s just about ready to graduate from Alpha. It already looks quite polished, and has the advantage that it appears familiar from the start – somewhere between Facebook and Google+. And that’s because Google+ copied some of its design and features. Although still limited in scope, the service is functional and quick: it will be interesting to see what the Beta version looks like, when it’s out.

Zee has an article today in TheNextWeb that is rather cynical about Diaspora. First of all, it’s a bit disingenuous to ask “Remember Diaspora?”. They got quite a bit of publicity lately when Google+ was unveiled. He also hints that the foursome behind the project have squandered the hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars they raised for it, giving themselves high-ish salaries (for kids fresh from college) and not producing a return on the investment. Yet since this is an open source project, even if the project stops tomorrow, someone else could take it up where they left off. And the amount invested in Diaspora is miniscule compared to what was invested in Google+ : some five hundred and eighty five million dollars, according to another article by Zee. He laughs at Diaspora’s current fundraising campaign (which seeks small donations of up to $25):

Today’s email is quite clearly a last ditch attempt from the team to keep things running – a “what have we got to lose?” moment I imagine. But one look at what’s been built with the $178,000+ raised should tell you your money is better spent, or indeed donated, elsewhere.

Well, I’ve looked, and while the interface still isn’t perfect, Google+ is not 3,000+ times better, though it cost 3,000+ times more (and apparently copied Diaspora into the bargain).

Why is it all right to cheer big companies while they use us as pawns to their personal enrichment, and at the same time ridicule the efforts of tiny companies who are attempting to produce worthy alternatives?

I learned about Richard Stallman’s “Glad He’s Gone” comments about Steve Jobs from Dave Winer on Twitter. I didn’t understand the later explanation in Scripting Notes about why he had characterized Stallman’s comments as appropriate and respectful. In general, there are many things in Dave Winer’s writing that I find hard to understand. This is not a criticism. Perhaps I’m just not on his wavelength or not intelligent enough.

Anyway my own take on Stallman’s comments is that they do not show much compassion towards the ordinary people for whom Jobs and co. created friendly consumer-technology that was a joy to use. He enabled non-technical people to appreciate the benefit of computers to their lives. Rather than “severing fools from their freedom”, he gave them tools to express themselves in new ways. Whereas in the hands of a Richard Stallman, Emacs running inside a Gnu/Linux console might be raw power, the average person will be more creative with a recent-edition word processor or even a Facebook status box.

There are trade-offs.

Following the announcement by UNESCO that the body recommended membership for Palestine as a member state, Secretary of State Clinton said that UNESCO should “think again” since this would lead to a loss of the up to $80,000,000 (Source: the Miami Herald.)

The rationale is that “current U.S.law prohibits giving funds to the United Nations or any U.N. agency that grants the Palestine Liberation Organization the same standing as member states. In addition, existing U.S. law can bar Washington from funding any U.N. body that accepts members that do not have the “internationally recognized attributes of statehood.” That requirement is generally, but not exclusively, interpreted to mean U.N. membership.”

Well, Israel itself lacks some of those “internationally recognized attributes of statehood. Like the intended State of Palestine, it lacks clearly defined borders. Or at least, it does not today accept the borders that were defined for it in 1949 (See Wikipedia). But this does not prevent Israel from receiving more than 3,000,000,000 each year from the US.

As of last January, the US owed more than $700,000,000 in arrears to the United Nations (Reuters) and for many years withdrew its membership in UNESCO. To the entire United Nations, the US gave more than $6,000,000,000 in 2009 (Source)

In view of the US tendency to use its UN contributions as blackmail, and to prevent other nations from doing the same, perhaps it would be better to change the system of contributions so that it is more evenly spread among nations. Either way, it is unacceptable that a member nation can be allowed to exert this kind of influence.

We bought a media computer this week, replacing a lousy underpowered integrated-linux box which never became useful. The new one has a dual core processor and a terabyte of data storage. Windows would have added $125 to the price, but I installed Ubuntu 11.10 beta instead. It recognized all the devices right away – including a USB wifi dongle and a wireless keyboard + trackball, so it was an effortless install. I’m still not sure which media applications to standardize on – will write about that later. I also did not begin to try out the TV card. But the system’s already working just fine as it is. We’re enjoying our music collection, and our son brought over a bunch of videos and movies, which were quickly transferred to the hard disk. Our photos also look stunning on the large screen. Consumer paradise.

 A new blog engine

This morning I discovered Blazeblogger, a static blog generator in the Ubuntu repositories. I don’t know how I missed it. It’s written in Perl, and is therefore compatible also with Windows systems. Although it has slightly less functionality to Nanoblogger (the software I was using), I’ve found it simpler to use. And although Nanoblogger has a publishing script (which Blazeblogger lacks), I anyway had trouble with it, and ended up using Filezilla.

I was able to set up Blazeblogger within minutes. It took a while longer to learn the basics and transfer a few older posts over to the new system. I was quite happy with the default template. The only thing that took me a while to accomplish was to add a few links to the blog template. It would have been nicer if that part of the page had an easier configuration option, but once I tracked down the right file it was easy enough.

I notice also that the folder size for Blazeblogger is considerably smaller than that of Nanoblogger, and that file actions are faster

I think the fuss-level of writing a text file and then uploading it through Filezilla has been one of the reasons that I stopped updating the blog lately. Certainly it would have been hard to publish the blog from the slow internet connections I had in India. (Note: on a static blog, publish means to transfer all files each time.) And I usually don’t get a blog post right the first time. In Blazeblogger, the process is just a shade easier, but that might be enough to get me going.

Thoughts on social networks

I’ve been deliberating a lot about social networks lately. It’s an opportune time because the ones with which I am most familiar: Identi.ca / status.net, Friendika and Diaspora, have made some important updates lately. Diaspora is finally attempting to deal with its backlog of new user requests, apparently ahead of a move from alpha to beta status. Friendika has a new version number and has been investing much effort in both visible and behind the scenes changes. Status.net is moving from 0.99 to 1.0.

My use of social networks is fairly minor because aside from Facebook (which I quit a few months back) I don’t have real life friends on any of them. Still, I like to have a place where I can occasionally say a few words that do not add up to a blog post.

As a network, Twitter has the most interest value for me simply because it has good people and news sources in its user base. However, I tend not to write directly to Twitter, and wonder about placing material there even indirectly.

I object to Facebook and Google+ for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they make me feel exploited. Our decisions regarding our use of the internet in the next few years will determine much about both the web and the future of humanity. The potential for creating an Orwellian society of surveillance and thought control has never been greater.

The distributed social networks offer a hope for something better. The three that have been mentioned (and a few more) each have advantages and failings. Status.net is the most veteran and minimal (though it is in some ways more advanced than Twitter). Friendika has the most features and perhaps the greatest potential. Friendika’s vision – particularly that of its eloquent Aussie lead developer Mike MacGirvin, is particularly full and rich. Diaspora is placed somewhere in the middle. It may have a greater chance of winning over non-geek users.

Ultimately, all of these services may work seemlessly together, so that it won’t make a big difference which one of them we use as a base. At present, I’ve found Friendika a little more bug-prone than the other two, and its servers more sluggish. For now, I am going with Diaspora.

I’m slowly moving my old WordPress blog over here [to static blog], by cutting and pasting the source code. A good programmer could easily make a script to do this, which would probably take even longer since I don’t have very many posts. And I’m slowly captioning my photos from India this summer. Maybe I’ll eventually create a post, based on photos and emails.

While I was in India, a whole protest movement was born in Israel, which led up to last night’s demonstrations of some 450,000. We attended the biggest of these, which was in Tel Aviv. After a long search for parking, we arrived around 10:15 to the main demonstration site, which was still full although getting there meant cutting through a tide of people who were already leaving. The main slogan of the demonstration and the movement has been “social justice”. People seem finally to be getting fed up with the increasingly capitalistic trends of recent decades, the withering of the welfare state and the growing gap between rich and poor. The Occupation is not being talked about, but Arabs and Bedouin were mentioned in the speeches in the context of neglected weak population groups requiring care. The avoidance of speaking about issues that are central to the Israeli reality (because they would be divisive) makes me feel ambivalent about the movement as a whole. Dorit thinks that heightening awareness to one set of social ills will lead to a broader awareness that will eventually bring about a change with regard to the Occupation. I think that this may be trying to treat the symptoms rather than the root causes. But we’ll see how it develops.