Posted by Doug
Thu, 06 Apr 2006 12:50:11 GMT
I had a conversation with a cousin of mine this weekend about her teenage kids using a social networking site. I think it was facebook, but it could have been myspace. She didn’t really know. She demonstrated some of the same “I don’t get it” mentality that Bill O’Reilly does in this video. (thanks for the link)
Danah Boyd is a PhD student at UC Berkeley. O’Reilly introduces her as an “anthropologist studying the Internet.” The story of the day is some 16 year old girl who was arrested for child pornography by publishing photos of herself on myspace. Bill has Danah on to explain what this stuff is all about. She really does do a pretty good job. I’m not an O’Reilly fan and almost never watch the show; however, I hope he has her on more often to explain that intarweb thing more often.
She said something really interesting about teenagers and social web sites. Bill asked her why they spend so much time on the web talking to their friends. Why not meet in person? Her response was that teenagers use many mediums to chat and hang out with their friends: phones, IM, and social networks. She said they would probably prefer to hang out in real space; but many parents don’t allow them to troll the neighborhood (my words) for fear of their safety.
It’s an interesting loop. As a parent I worry a great deal about just letting my kids ride their bikes where ever. When I was a kid, we did. The neighborhood was pretty much mine to roam. So, we keep our kids home to keep them safe. Kids wanting to hang out with kids, they turn to the Internet to socialize. But now we’re afraid (and rightly so) of the same people who may harm our kids physically harming them online.
Posted in Family, Internet, Community | 5 comments
Posted by Doug
Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:23:01 GMT
Go and install Chax. “Chax is a collection of minor modifications and additions that make using Apple’s iChat more enjoyable.” As of today, I’ve punted on Adium. What was the main impetus for switching back to iChat? Chax adds tabbed message windows.
Here’s some other things I did to make iChat more enjoyable. It’s weird, but you have to click on each buddy list and then choose View -> “Use Groups”. The default seems to be to put all your buddies in one big list. I’m sorry to those of you I know but don’t care to see your status. I’d like to keep you in my buddy list, but not have to clutter up my list with your nick. Using groups allow you to expand and collapse groups of users making your buddy list easier to glance at.
Besides Chax’s tabs in the message window, here’s another good thing: click on the message window and then View -> “Show Names” and View -> “Show Text”. Both of these make for much more dense message windows allowing you to drastically shrink the amount of vertical screen space dedicated to chat.
Things I still wish for: per message time stamping. That’s really petty of me, but I like to see quickly which each message arrived. Also, I like how Adium supports Off-the-Record Messaging Encryption. Finally, I haven’t figured out how to take advantage of Chax’s logging. Either way, Chax is worth a look.
Posted in Software, Internet, Mac OS X | 1 comment
Posted by Doug
Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:35:37 GMT
This is an interesting observation on AJAX web calendars by Joel Spolsky:
Why so many Ajax calendars? My theory is that about a year ago, there was a lot of buzz (possibly true, possibly false) about Google shipping a calendar, and everybody thought, oh gosh, it’s gonna be really good, like Gmail, and then Yahoo! is going to be embarrassed again, and run out and buy the best Ajax calendar company they can find, just like they did with Oddpost, making those very funny kids millionaires overnight. So people aren’t really building calendars to sell to people like me who need calendars: they’re building calendar companies to sell to Yahoo!, which, for some reason, has given up on the old concept of hiring programmers to write code, and is going with this new age concept of buying entire companies on the hopes that they might contain a good programmer or two, which, by the way, is a sure sign of trouble for a technology company.
I haven’t really used any of the web calendars, but he may be right. This fits in with my thinking about building products: you have to build something for customers. I think not enough companies spend time thinking about and delivering what their customers want. In this case even the “Web 2.0” companies are failing at that.
Posted in Internet | Tags AJAX, Calendars | 7 comments
