So this happened: they gave the Pope an iPad and he went and signed up for Twitter. For his very first tweet, he sent a picture of his junk to that cute altar boy from Thursday’s Mass. He can’t deny it’s his penis because the tip looks like one of those funny hats he wears.
Early versions of mobile phones were consider too bulky to carry.
Wired does us all a favor this morning by explaining exactly WTF “4G” means. (HINT: it’s marketing bullshit)
This post at Maximum PC is a pretty good assessment of 6 technologies that have been rendered obsolete and a counter-list of 6 technologies that aren’t going away any time soon. The only one I think they’ve got wrong is keys.
If it wasn’t bad enough that Twitter has already turned a significant portion of the world’s population into drooling half-wits by reducing messages to 140 characters, the Japanese are here to make sure we go the Full Moron by creating this animatronic panda that will read your incoming tweets out loud to you, so you don’t even have to read about the next time Ashton Kutcher takes a shit or Sarah Palin says something inane.
You’ve undoubtedly heard the factoid that Netflix streaming video now accounts for nearly 20% of Internet traffic between 8:00-10:00 p.m. Eastern Time. You probably also know that Netflix is cited as Reason #1 for the death of Blockbuster Video (see the infographic above). And now, according to Fast Company, Netflix boasts more subscribers than the premium cable channels Showtime and Starz. In that article, FC wonders when Netflix will start producing their own content, the way that the premium cable networks finally started doing in the ’90s, but given the less-than-subtle efforts of the cable/telco industry to end net neutrality as a way to jack up bandwidth pricing to Netflix, I have to wonder if what they really need to do is buy their way into a service provider. If Comcast can own NBC-Universal, maybe Netflix could buy out a struggling cable company or help take FiOS off of Verizon’s hands.
Oh, if this only worked.
My inner 12-year-old was deeply amused to see this in my referrer log recently.
Remind me never to go to the Playboy Mansion for “Make Your Own Sundae Night”.
In 1969, Astronaut Neil Armstrong slowly made his way down the ladder of his lunar landing craft then took a breathtaking leap to place the very first human footprint on the surface of another world. Billions of people sat transfixed in front of television sets all over the world waiting for him to speak. His words, so very carefully chosen in advance, instantly became a fixture of human history forever:
“That was one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”
Yesterday, the communications software aboard the International Space Station was upgraded to provide direct access to the Internet. Astronaut T. J. Creamer took advantage of the technological advance to secure his own place in human history by posting the first unaided Tweet from outer space:
Centuries from now, the future slaps its collective forehead.
In 1977, as part of the Voyager space probe program, NASA chartered scientist Carl Sagan and a blue-ribbon panel to put together a recording of sounds, music, and languages to represent the people and other life on Earth. Imprinted on a disc of gold, the recordings were accompanied by pictographs depicting our planet’s location, solar system, instructions on how to play the recording, and even drawings of a man and woman with hands raised in greeting. The disc was attached to the Voyager 1 probe, which left our solar system in 1990, will take 40,000 years to reach the closest star system that could host inhabited planets. Carl Sagan wrote about the disc’s intent:
“The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”
Now, thirty-two years later, humanity once again reaches out into the cold black void of interstellar space and calls out to see if anyone is there…only this time in the form of Twitter. “Hello From Earth.net” is a project from the Australian science magazine COSMOS as part of the Australian government’s National Science Week. They’ve arranged to beam a radio transmission through the auspices of NASA and the Deep Space Communication Complex in Canberra at a planet that was discovered orbiting the star Gliese 581, one of the 100 stars closest to our solar system. The transmission will consist entirely of text messages submitted by the public, each one 160 characters in length (20 characters more than you can enter in a Twitter message).
Hello From Earth is accepting messages until 0700 GMT, Monday August 24, so you have a couple of weeks to tweet to the stars, if you are so inclined.
What are the People Of Earth saying to our far-flung brethren? Here are a few of the most popular submissions so far:
- Hi There: Sorry about the Outer Limits; hope you enjoyed I Love Lucy. Have you got all our missing socks? Love, Earth
Fred Mason
Roberts Creek, Australia- How come you never call anymore? and also, I tried adding you on facebook many times but had no response. If its about the drinking…I can change
Jono
Melbourne, Australia- hereby volunteer for the first inter-species breeding program. HELLO LADIES! Lets get to know each other over a nice glass of blue milk.
matt jivin
new york, United States
That humming sound you hear off in the distance is Carl Sagan spinning in his grave, billions and billions of times per second.
Remember Orkut? It’s Google’s social networking app that debuted in 2004 and became all the rage among the digerati for a while, especially since you had to be invited to be able to sign up for the service. Well, it wasn’t all that hard to get an invite, and so people descended on the thing like hungry locusts, tossing around invites like so much confetti, and for a while it seemd like Google had “done it again”. Except nobody had bothered to really think about what the hell they were supposed to do with it, and when it became readily apparent after about three months that there wasn’t anything to do with it except invite people and build buddy lists, everybody stopped using it. Except the Brazilians. Orkut transformed into the single most popular social networking application in Brazil, and is now mostly in Portuguese, catering to the interests of a much more specialized group.
That was my first exposure to social networking, and as such turned into the formative experience that led me to avoid the more recent fad for social networking websites. After all, how different could they be from Orkut when you got right down to it, and how long would it take for them to similarly collapse like neutron stars and become singularities?
About six months ago, though, I joined Twitter. Twitter seems to have reduced the concept down to the barest elements. The 7th-Grade cliquish crap of adding and deleting friends is still a large motivator for the whole thing, but the interaction has been reduced to tiny messages. It’s the bastard stepchild of social networking and instant messaging, and the appeal to people who wanted to blog but couldn’t come up with anything to say day after day was huge. It didn’t bowl me over, and I discovered that I really didn’t have anything to say that could be reduced to 140 characters, so I don’t use it all that much. When I do use it, I have to wade through a few people who either have to post every little thing they do all day (“Going to wipe my ass just as soon as the rest of this turd comes out”) or post vague and inscrutable statements that only mean something inside their own minds. I probably only check it once a week and find I am not missing all that much.
So yesterday, after much consideration, I joined Facebook (NOTE: you have to BE a Facebook member to visit that link), since it seems that over the past year it has gone completely mainstream. As somebody who usually gets in on the ground floor of a lot of aspects of digital life, it seemed like I was overdue to have this experience. That was completely confirmed for me as I went through the signup process and Facebook sucked up all my contact list data and started showing me how many of my very non-digital friends were long-time members. Other people have commented on discovering that their grandmother or their parents were on Facebook, and while that isn’t the case for me, I did find my youngest brother and a whole bevy of people that I would never have expected would be on board.
Quite frankly, that tells me that Facebook and MySpace and the other big-time social networking sites are about to turn into the next AOLs, if they haven’t already. Your hip, cool young person does not want to be associated with his or her grandma on a social website, and if it’s something that has gotten tame enough for grandma to use, there must be something cooler and edgier. For us middle-aged geezers, it’s clear that the whole appeal of the site is to look up old acquaintances and make fun of the ones that have gotten fatter/balder/saggier than you and burn with jealousy over the ones who are more successful/thinner/married-up than you. But once every 40-something in America has had a good chuckle at their senior class rival, they’re going to stop looking at the site and go find some more porn to watch online.
The other evening at the “career transition” support group I attend, one of the women, who was laid off from an executive secretarial job after 20 years and is having a hard time adjusting to modern job-seeking, said that she felt quite thwarted to see job listings where “ability to use social networking sites” was a job requirement. I can understand her flummoxedness (flummoxity? flummel?), but I found myself shaking my head to think of the pointy-headed bosses who somehow think this is the Next Big Thing and they’re going to score big if they can get X number of friends on their Facebook. Time to start learning Portuguese, fellas.
I did find one college friend I hadn’t heard from in six or seven years, but I was pretty sure I was going to see him there anyway. Honestly, I am pretty much in touch with anyone I want to be in touch with from high school or college, so I’m not likely to go seeking out long-lost childhood chums. Once the initial spurt of “friending” is done, I presume I’ll spend very little time with Facebook. I have plenty of other online distractions as it is.
Out from under the thumb of corporate IT security for a bit, I decided to give Twitter a try, given the enormous amount of hype it gets in some online quarters. If you have somehow managed not to hear about or know about Twitter, the basic idea is that it lets you post short messages that can be seen by other people who choose to follow your messages, and vice versa. In other words, it’s sort of like the way email was way back when, using the social networking concept of “get all your friends to do this RIGHT NOW!”
So far, I’m not wildly excited by it. The service is plagued by its own success and is so overwhelmed by people sending messages that it just plain stops working for hours at a time. They just got some funding from Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and another hot VC firm, so hopefully they can upgrade their server farm to the point where it’s at least reliable. But the quality of the technical aspect of the service is nothing compared to the issue of the quality of the content. I’m following about 30 people at the moment. Several of them (maybe 5) are very earnest Twitterers. They send out messages all day and night, very often use the service as a way to solicit information or feedback from others, and clearly are thinking about how this particular widget can be useful. But most of the messages from most of the people never go much beyond “What I had for lunch” or “I wish I could take a nap”. And even I am guilty of not being able to think up anything much more interesting to say, even though I somehow manage to write all these long blog posts every day.
One one hand, it reminds me of the early days of blogging, when the basic styles were not quite as well defined and people used them much in the same manner to post short, quippy updates about what was going on with them. So many of those people left blogging behind a long time ago; if 9/11 didn’t get them, the 2004 election cycle did. I would guess that many, if not most, of the people who liked blogs for that chatty, social interaction have become ardent Twitterers. It suits the need to say something directly to a guaranteed audience of willing lookers-on and does not demand the same level of creativity and committment that blogging turned out to have.
The IM-like character of Twitter is not nearly as compelling. Personally, I have always disliked instant messaging for its intrusiveness — maybe I really don’t wan’t to have a slightly-asynchronous conversation with someone right this minute. Because most Twitter posts (“tweets”, they call them…ugh) are general statements that do not necessarily require a response from anyone, it’s easier to let them slide without feeling that you’re snubbing someone in the process. When somebody does specifically direct a remark at you, it’s more like email than instant messaging. You can reply when you’ve had a chance to think about it and write a response without thinking someone is waiting for an immediate reply.
I find myself slightly amused by the earnest ones, because they were the same people who believed that blogs/IM/SecondLife/whatever were going to revolutionize everything and always bring that same degree of credulity to whatever online experience they have. I am more encouraged to see people recognize it as less of “The Next Big Thing” and more of “a less annoying form of e-mail”. I am a fairly chatty fellow when you get me engaged in a conversation, and I like the idea of being able to fire a quick message out to a friend or a small group of friends. I don’t like the idea of using it like a pulpit with a microphone to issue edicts and beneficent missives to my many any loyal subjects and followers. But, then, I never cared for blogs (and bloggers) who saw themselves as prophets or demi-celebrities either.
I found myself nodding my head in agreement (as usual) as I read Les’s post about not quite getting social networking in general and Twitter in particular. He clearly falls into the “why do I care what you had for lunch” camp, and, seriously, this sort of trivial and ephemeral status update messaging is absolutely worthless. Of course, the corollary to that is that there are quite a few people in this world who are not capable of conversation any more compelling than “how’s the weather?” You’re just being made far more aware of them because they can share this vacuity with you via the Internet.
But I think that very situation lays bare the real worthlessness of all the social network sites that are so popular at the moment. It seems that they really only exist for people to build lists of friends and thus create the appearance that these people are really interconnecting, when they’re mostly just swapping virtual trading cards. The better ones find some particular utility that can meet some sort of need. For example, I think LinkedIn is a particularly good application of social networking because it directly ties in to the eternal need for business contacts. But the MySpace/Facebook genre seems particularly devoid of utility. Fine for goofing around when you are a high schooler or college student with plenty of time to devote to the fine art of mindless fucking off, but vastly limited otherwise. Like some of the “Web 1.0″ websites that seemed like they were sure things, I just can’t imagine there being any lingering value to these. Twitter, if it is lucky, has the potential to turn into a useful enough thing to become a must-have app on just about everyone’s desktop the way that IM did, but it’s probably not because anybody needs to know that I ate ramen noodles with chicken today.
MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Vox, LiveJournal, and more — if Web 1.0 was about stupid e-commerce sites, Web 2.0 is about stupid social networking sites. The only thing that separates social networking sites from more traditional Ponzi schemes is that the suckers members don’t have to pay any cash to get in…although, just like a pyramid con, you’re never going to get anything back, either.
If you’re tired of getting invited by every single person you ever met to join these sites, maybe you should consider signing up for the first ANTI-social networking site: BugrOff (that’s pronounced Bugger OFF!, just in case you weren’t sure)
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