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iPad isn't for everyone, so deal with it

Publié: mai 18, 2010, 10:55pm CEST par Joe Wilcox

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

Thirty-two days ago, I purchased Apple's iPad, after proclaiming that I wouldn't. A gadget like this one should be tested if repeatedly blogged about. I would have used a for-reviews loaner, but I'm on the same fraked list as Gizmodo. I bought my own. A month-or-so usage later, I agree with Tumblr and Instapaper developer Marco Arment, who asked about iPad yesterday: "What's it for, really? Logically, it doesn't make a lot of sense for most computer owners...most people will have trouble justifying the $500 entry price."
My problem is similar to Arment's: I like the iPad, but can't find a use for it. The tablet is too big to replace a cell phone and it's not functional enough to displace my laptop (singletasking is one of the major reasons for that). I would never buy the butt-ugly Amazon Kindle or slow-as-cold-molasses Barnes and Noble Nook, yet I find iPad to be a so-so satisfactory substitute e-book reader. I managed to reread Orson Scott Card's excellent Ender's Game and am trudging through sequel Speaker for the Dead. But it's reading for convenience, not joy.
"A gadget just needs to be good at something that you need or want to do," Arment writes. Yeah exactly. He has found a few good-at-somethings, but I assert nothing that he couldn't do as well -- or better -- on a laptop. "It's the perfect living-room computer that lives on the coffee table and can be used to quickly look up a fact, find a restaurant, check mail, browse news, and play a game," he asserts. So is my smartphone, which doesn't cost $499 to $829.
The personal computer succeeded in part because it is versatile, multi-use, all-purpose device. The PC does many things fairly well. Ubiquity is why the PC is ubiquitous. But as I predicted, Apple's tablet isn't really good enough to replace PC or smartphone. Arment writes:
Accepting that the iPad isn't an all-purpose computing device is going to be a slow process for everyone, including Apple. They can't quite explain what it's for, either, which is why the launch marketing, software, and accessories are a bit scatterbrained. For instance, if you're using a hardware keyboard with the iPad very often, you'd probably be much better served by a MacBook Air.
So what is iPad good for then? Arment and I agree on something else. Eleven days ago my post "Usability expert faults iPad user interface, calls it 'whacky'" dinged Apple's tablet. But in iPad's defense, I explained: "There also is UX, or user experience, which is as much emotive as it is functional...iPhone is more a joy to use [than Google Nexus One]. There's something about UI design and tactile, responsiveness of the screen that make me feel good. I can say the same about using iPad."
Arment describes using iPad as "satisfying and delightful." I totally agree. It's the main reason I have resisted selling mine. Functionally, my iPad isn't good enough at anything to justifying keeping it. But emotionally, I'm hooked. I find parting with iPad to be difficult. Sitting down to use the tablet, I suddenly get girlie giggly. It's a happy experience. If you asked me why, I would say it has something to do with the the user interface's beauty and how it responds to my touch. But that kind of intellectual evaluation just doesn't nail down why.
Yesterday, Nokia's Joe Gallo tweeted: "Can anyone explain to me why this video is funny http://bit.ly/hoXKj." Gallo referred to YouTube video "Charlie bit my finger -- again!," which has 191,352,797 views, as I write. I resisted laughing but couldn't stop on second viewing. "By that last tweet, I meant, I was cracking up and had no idea why!" Gallo later tweeted. In assessing my response to iPad, I have similar reaction. I can't put my finger on why (no pun intended) using iPad makes me happy.
There are lots worse reasons for using a product than it makes you happy, and many product designers would kill to have that kind of customer problem. "Ah, our product gives you joy even though you can't fathom a use for it, and you're going to keep it even though you've got no use for it?"
I'll use iPad for awhile longer to test the apps and to see whether this happy thing wears off. I've already had several good offers to buy the Apple tablet. But my answers have been nos. Functionally, iPad isn't for everyone, and it's probably not for most people. Too many features overlap the smartphone below and laptop above. Nevertheless, here's a question for potential buyers: How much joy can you get for $500 -- iPad's starting price? Stated another way, how much joy is worth spending $500?
I giggle every time I turn the damn thing on. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll find a real use for iPad. For now, a little joy is reason enough.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Data Google skimmed with street view cars gets destroyed in Ireland, but that's not good enough for Germany

Publié: mai 18, 2010, 8:56pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Last Friday, Google announced that its Street View cars had accidentally collected private data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks while making their rounds, and the international response began in full force.
The same day, the Irish Data Protection Authority asked Google to delete all of that payload that was collected in Ireland. Yesterday, Google wrote, "We can confirm that all data identified as being from Ireland was deleted over the weekend in the presence of an independent third party. We are reaching out to Data Protection Authorities in the other relevant countries about how to dispose of the remaining data as quickly as possible."
Independent security firm iSEC Partners Inc also confimed the deletion. Partner Alex Stamos said that Google had consolidated the Wi-Fi packet captures onto four hard drives, organized into folders corresponding to the nation of origin, and the data relevant to Ireland was then destroyed.
"I created two new encryped volumes on separate hard drives, and copied over all of the data with the exception of the data that was identified as being captured within the Republic of Ireland," Stamos wrote on Sunday, "I then witnessed the physical destruction of the original four hard drives."
Today, however, German data security representative Johannes Caspar said this would not be enough, and that Google has until May 26 to turn over the hard drive with German data on it, so the extent of the infraction can be inspected.
Caspar told The Thuringer today that Google has to do anything it can to repair its tarnished reputation.
"Before it can, we must be granted access to all of the collected data," Caspar said. "Only then can it be clearly documented what kind of data was saved. Despite repeated demands, we've had no opportunity yet, to sift through a hard disk with all of the data."
Caspar has more meetings with Google this week in Hamburg.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Amazon announces Kindle for Android, a new hope dawns for Android tablets against the iPad

Publié: mai 18, 2010, 6:06pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Kindle is, without a doubt, the highest profile e-reader platform running. With applications on iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Windows, and OS X as well as its own line of e-paper Kindle devices, Amazon had an estimated 90% share of the e-book sales market last year.
Today, Amazon announced that a Kindle app will be launched on the Android mobile operating system this summer.
Like the BlackBerry app, Android users will be able to purchase Amazon e-books inside the mobile app. That functionality is noticeably absent on the iPhone and iPad versions, where users must go to the browser to download new books.
If Amazon were to include that functionality on the iPhone and iPad apps, a 30% commission for in-app purchases would have to be paid to Apple, which is not exactly the most economically feasible solution for Amazon.
But what this means is that the bevy of Android tablets coming out this year will be able to offer the full Kindle experience where the iPad will not; and as we saw last month, some Android tablets are really suitable only as e-readers. Giving these devices unfettered access to the Kindle Store's market-dominating 500,000+ e-books is a great boon to the platform.
It is worth noting, however, that this version will only be compatible with Android 1.6 and up, and that subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, and blogs will not be supported when the app is released in the next few weeks.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
New Hotmail lets you add bigger attachments, organize your inbox, edit documents

Publié: mai 18, 2010, 4:52pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

I'm constantly reminded how slow email actually is.
On the homescreen of one of my smartphones, I've got the official Twitter widget and the official Facebook widget which are pretty much constantly refreshing. Likewise, my email inbox is set to refresh just as frequently. Every day, when someone sends me a message in Facebook or replies to a Tweet, the widgets tell me first, and then five minutes later I get the email alerting me again. Because of this, I have an email account just for social network updates that is overflowing with unread messages.
My fast, immediate communications have been shifted to other services, but the more heavyweight content: presentations, photos, and documents are still being sent over email.
Today, Microsoft announced it is releasing a new Windows Live Hotmail this summer to suit the "peoples' email needs as of 2010," which includes finding a way to organize all of that semi-relevant junkmail and a way to send even bigger attachments.
The new Hotmail inbox will let users organize their emails in new ways. Where the old inbox just let you sort your emails by date, sender, subject, or size, the new inbox will also let you sort them by category. These categories include: messages from contacts, social network updates, or messages from groups and mailing lists. Because social network updates and mailing list posts are sometimes unwanted, you can sort them by category and push them into folders and out of your principal inbox.
Microsoft is also tying in its SkyDrive cloud storage feature into Hotmail, letting users attach as many as 200 photos each 50MB in size to a single email. The same goes for Office documents like Word files, Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations, you can stick 10 GB of attachments to Live Hotmail email messages.
With Office documents, a bit of productivity has been folded into Hotmail. Users can open the documents in Office Live, make changes, and push them back to the original sender with all the updates.
The update this summer will also add enhanced account protection, full-session SSL, multiple email accounts, subfolders, contact management, and even more storage.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Microsoft - Facebook - Windows Live Hotmail - Windows Live SkyDrive - Social network
If you think Facebook privacy is so bad, the open Web is worse

Publié: mai 18, 2010, 8:03am CEST par Joe Wilcox

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

It seems like anyone who wants to be anybody is whacking Facebook over its loose -- or rather loosening -- privacy policies. Earlier this month, with disregard to the grammer momma taught me, I asked: "Which is Eviler? Apple, Facebook or Google?" Even I whacked CEO Mark Zuckerberg aside the head about Facebook privacy. As bad as pundits make out Facebook privacy to be, people can, and do, reveal plenty of information on the Web, too. Which place do they reveal more? I set out to find out in a non-scientific experiment, looking for publicly available information about one of my sisters.
I got to rethinking Facebook privacy over the weekend, after reading New York Times post "World's Largest Social Network: The Open Web" by Randall Stross. "The links on the trillion Web addresses found by Google, and within the billions of Tweets that have followed, form an incomparably vast, truly worldwide, web of recommendations, supplied by fellow humans," Stross writes. "In this sense, the open Web has a strong claim to being more 'social' than does Facebook."
I'll go further: Because of search engines' effectiveness and how many sites allow Bing-, Google- or rival-bot crawling, many people already expose lots of information -- and often without knowing. So I decided to compare Facebook to the Web. Just how much information is exposed?
Information Exposed by the Web
One of my sisters is a missionary in Central America. She is an experienced computer user -- actually works parttime for an IT support company -- keeps a blog and uses Facebook. My quest: Could I easily and quickly find as much information about her on the Web as she reveals on Facebook? I chose this sister because missionary work takes her out of the mainstream.
I Googled her name, which pulled up as top hit: the results from a New York state bike race from the early 2000s -- and a walking race from a few years earlier later on the first page. Additional race information from other years suggested that she participates in an annual event. So there is one day of the year, where I know where she will be. I then searched for her name and missionary country, finding a blog revealing her full name, confirming her husband's name (from the earlier search) and providing additional personal information and photos, which helped to identify her and her husband as the searches continued. The initial search also led to a Facebook athletic group.
Bing did better with her name, by pulling up as first hit a service called "My Life." Without registering for "My Life," I got her age, middle name and permanent US address. Another service, "ZoomInfo," revealed where she works (as corroborated by information revealed by other searches). Other race results confirmed the US address as being valid. But Bing fumbled her name and missionary country search, leading to no usable results in the first five pages.
I circled back to my sister's blog, and clicked through links to three Christian ministries -- one of them in Central America. That missionary group page had a pastor's blog that included photos of my sister (matching the likeness on her blog) and identifying her role working for the ministry as recently as 2008. Another link revealed that she is affiliated with all three ministries, provided an e-mail address and exposed her telephone number, as contained in a recent newsletter.
So, without ever using Facebook, and following the trail of search breadcrumbs, I got her full name, name of her husband, permanent US address, current location (but not physical address) in Central America, past (or possibly current) employer, names of three ministries she currently works with in Central America, e-mail address and phone number. I also identified several annual races she participates in, one which later in the search turned out to be affiliated with one of the ministries, and a Facebook group she belongs to. All of this took about 45 minutes using Bing and Google.
Even More From Facebook
What does my sister reveal on Facebook? OMG! Privacy? What is privacy? I set up a fake Facebook account (which should cancel out as I didn't verify the e-mail) and immediately searched for my sister. Since the fake account had no friends, I observed just how much personal information she exposes. Available to any Facebook account holder is a treasure trove of personal information. "[Sister's name] only shares some of her profile information with everyone," according to her profile page. Some?
Publicly available on her profile page: Name, two of her children's names, mother's name, sisters' names, her location in Central America, list of nearly 250 friends and Wall post galore. A fan page confirmes her place of parttime employment and the previously identified athletic group fan page. Wall posts reveal that she is attending a conference and where and identifies where her husband will be next month. So on and so on. My Facebook data mining took about 5 minutes. My sister has some control over what information is disclosed on Facebook. Most of the information I found in Web searches came from someone else. She really has no control over that at all.
What Facebook didn't expose, the Web searches provided. My sister's Facebook profile picture is a childhood photo, but her blog and the pastor's blog have current pics. The missionary site disclosed my sister's e-mail address and phone number. My sister tends to be guarded about her personal data, or so she thinks. For someone less guarded, I should have easily gotten more personally identifiable information -- even from just a Web search. I presume that like many Facebook users, my sister extends privileges to friends of friends. I could have gotten even more information had I friended one of her friends (Oh I was tempted!).
I'll have to ring my sister and explain that all her Wall posts are public. Perhaps because of something in my settings (I should check), I am not listed with my other siblings as being related to her. Then, again, maybe I'm disowned -- or will be after she reads this post. Perhaps my sister will forgive me, because I respected her privacy enough not to disclose her name. Perhaps. My public Facebook profile is pretty barebones right now, and nowhere do I see any public Wall posts that would reveal my sister's identity. Facebook friends probably could ferret out her name, though.
[Update 12:07 pm: Someone tweeted about Profile Watch. I ran my suster's profile, which scored 8 out of 10. Uh-oh, meaning she doesn't reveal lots of information. Now how can that be? More surprising: Mine is a five. Facebook CEO Zuckerberg: 1.6.]
So my question for you: Does Facebook reveal too much information? Hell, do Bing and Google? One way to answer: Conduct an exercise similar to mine and see how much information you can find out fast about a relative -- or even yourself -- through Web search and Facebook. Please answer the questions in comments.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Facebook - Google - Mark Zuckerberg - Central America - New York
MySpace revamps privacy settings to counter Facebook's muddled set of options

Publié: mai 18, 2010, 2:20am CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Facebook grew more popular than Myspace just about two years ago, and has been been enjoying steady growth while MySpace flounders trying to reinvent itself.
But the recent attention brought to Facebook's privacy issues -specifically the complaint filed with the US Federal Trade Commission by EPIC pointing out that Facebook data isn't as private as it once was- has opened a door for MySpace to jam its foot into.
The New York Times last week called Facebook's privacy settings "A bewildering tangle of options," with 50 settings menus with more than 170 options, and a privacy statement more than 1,200 words longer than the U.S. Constitution.
MySpace Co-president Mike Jones seized on this opportunity to announce its "New, simpler privacy setting."
"We want our users to know we are planning the launch of a simplified privacy setting for our user profiles. While we've had these plans in the works for some time, given the recent outcry over privacy concerns in the media, we felt it was important to unveil those plans to our users now," Jones said. "We believe users want a simpler way to control their privacy. That's why, in the coming weeks, MySpace will continue to simplify its privacy settings to create a simpler, more intuitive approach that gives users greater control over their information. Setting options will include public, friends only, or public to anyone 18 or over. In making this change, MySpace will default the setting to 'friends only' for any user who previously had any granular page setting to 'friends only.' Users can change this option with one click if they choose."
A small number of Facebook users with a disproportionately loud voice have pledged to shut down their Facebook profiles on May 31, the unofficial "Quit Facebook Day."
From the site's sub-heading that explains why users are quitting, it says: "For a lot of people, quitting Facebook revolves around privacy. This is a legitimate concern, but we also think the privacy issue is just the symptom of a larger set of issues. The cumulative effects of what Facebook does now will not play out well in the future, and we care deeply about the future of the web as an open, safe and human place. We just can't see Facebook's current direction being aligned with any positive future for the web, so we're leaving."
Maybe they can be enticed to get behind MySpace.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Privacy - Mike Jones - MySpace - Facebook - New York Times