I try to say a lot while saying very little. Get used to it.
Posts tagged online
notes: buzzing around
Feb 17th
Posted by SEV in staying.interested
Google’s latest experiment – Buzz – has been launched to the world recently, with varying degrees of appreciation, hate, irritation and all the reactions that every new social idea is greeted with. Personally, it is a social media outlet/inlet that I can get on board with – seeing as how it integrates nicely into my existing Gmail/Google experience. It has its caveats though.. features/glitches/annoyances that I wish they had ironed out before getting it out the door:
- Google Reader posts can be easily imported to Buzz – and comments on Buzz are back-ported to Reader. However, liking and reading of Reader imports in Buzz are not back-ported into Reader. Irritating in some cases, when there’s nothing much to see. Good in other cases, as I may miss something/want to re-buzz something.
- Privacy settings from Reader are correctly applied for such posts (unsurprising, as the dashboard for Reader privacy is still through Reader) – so if I can’t comment on your shared item in Reader, I can’t in Buzz either. However, the status of those settings is not correctly shown in Buzz. Everything imported from Reader appears as ‘Public’, when in reality, only the item is public – the discussion ability is anything but for the ‘Public’.
- Google seems confused as to what they want to make Buzz. A single life-stream source that you check for all your social updates? Or just another interface to their social services – to popularize them more? I would have thought the former.
- Setting privacy settings in a particular way is not easy. Needs a lot of thought, as each Google service still makes use of its own privacy settings. For example, I didn’t want to see a particular person’s Reader shared items in Buzz. Unfollowing them has a global effect – I unfollow them on Reader too in the process. I ended up unfollowing them and adding the RSS feed of their shared items in Reader separately. Crude, but effective. Similar ideas have been suggested for re-buzzing.
- A cool idea is posting via email to Buzz, but the functionality is more of a status update than a post — more like short updates posted to Twitter. The power of length offered by Buzz is not exploited as the body text is ignored for such a Buzz update. Sad really, as would have been such a simple yet refreshing re-buzz idea.
- ‘@’ replies are nigh-impossible when you do not know the person’s Gmail ID that is associated with the Google profile.
- Muting is golden.
Feature requests I have galore: lists/groups support, ordering/collapsing messages, re-buzzing, additional import options into Buzz, selective streaming for my Buzz feed etc etc.
I’ve discovered whole hosts of new people (who have also discovered me) and have already had some interesting conversations using it. Most privacy complaints and issues I’ve read with are minor or non-existent: I firmly see BIG things in Buzz’s future.
If only it would get here faster.
(to be added to if I think of more)
Update (26 Feb 2010): Via Reader found a series of comments I had missed on a Reader-Buzz export. Searching through my Buzzes in Gmail showed me I muted this post. However, opening it up there does not show me any comments on it at ALL. According to this post muting a Buzz apparently mutes me from ALL future comments on that post in Buzz, to the extent that the related Buzz in my Gmail does not show the new comments after I muted it i.e. muting completely silences the Buzz conversation for me from that point on. Even if I’m ‘@’ mentioned in it. Need to use it more sparingly.
the indian broadband “revolution”
Apr 26th
Posted by SEV in staying.aside
given that this has happened, india is on the fast track in more than one field.
interestingly, it occurred to me first that we’ll probably rule in piracy too now. just a thought.
do dark times really lie ahead ?
Dec 5th
Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts
after reading this, a question that has been hovering at the back of my head begs analysis.
i’ve spoken about it before as well, and even if i have been disparaging about the reaction of people to a lot of the mails i have received, some current developments mean second thoughts should be had. if not third.
orkut is, and always has been very open in terms of structure: everyone finds everyone, meets anyone, can read about anyone, can add anyone. the concept was that you would not invite someone you do not know to orkut. however, making gmail – and hence orkut – available to anyone kinda kicks that idea in the teeth. orkut is not the “trusted circle” of friends they call themselves anymore. the effect is already seen – fake profiles are created for every possible misuse – whether slander, paedophilia, or just a misguided sense of fun.
scraps are literally meant to be ’scraps’: pointless tid-bits. and should be used that way. people misuse them, talk about everyone on them – there will be consequences to acting thoughtlessly. i think orkut scraps were designed to be quick ‘hey-how-are-you’ messages, not personal ads. or long messages about the self. are we still worried about the content being publicly accessible? delete all scraps. i have nearly 2000, would keeping them help me? i think not. deleted.
how restrictive is orkut when it comes to details ? you can choose who can see what, some generic details are open to all. those details, i should think, are pretty common. or obvious. religion, language, books, music.. these are shared by a wide majority. i see now that ‘google talk id’ is common knowledge – i.e. can be seen by everyone – which is stupid. can i change that ? only if i disable google talk+orkut. which is pointless integration i have come to believe. disabled.
i’m not saying that these are the only issues, there are more which i may be skipping over. when they do occur to me, there will be updates. the point is that this source of possible privacy breach can be controlled to some extent.
now, for the question of whether its safe at all. there are two parts to it. the first depends on what level i stop at for restricting privacy. the second is pertaining to how far misuse by a third party affects me.
today, having an online presence is a matter of choice. on the internet, i have currently chosen to maintain a fairly public blog, a photo album, profiles on various forums, a social networking presence, and email. the blog is easily found when searched on any search engine – and has enough detail about me to identify me. is that safe ? not exactly, if someone means to do harm by using information about me, against me. but that was a choice i made when i associated my blog with me. my other presences aren’t as public, but can be found if needed. the bottom line is that once you decide to exist online, you have to decide where you draw the line of privacy when it comes to publicly accessible knowledge. not so publicly accessible knowledge – that is the gray area. google is a repository for a lot of my data – my mail, my notes, my calendar, my photos and so on. do i trust google enough to not misuse this information ? i have to. or else i don’t use the service. the same logic applies to semi-public information e.g. orkut. i have to trust that google, amazon, paypal, ebay and so many other services i use everyday will not decide they can do whatever they want with all that information.
the fine print of any online service would yield some very scary codicils. yahoo and msn are supposed to have clauses that say any work transmitted via them becomes their property. orkut retains some rights over what information you put up on it. bloglines has some kind of rights over the content of feeds you access via their interface. and so on.
when you decided to get an online presence – and that includes an webmail account – you decided you trust someone with all that information. that google is trying to centralize all your online information, and doing it successfully, doesn’t make them the big bad wolf… it makes them the smartest of all the little piggy online services out there.
misuse of my information that is accessible by someone else – the question is who.. and what. orkut ? i believe its just a neat way of keeping in touch. say, i see a profile of someone else, and from what i know of the person, the data appears fake – am i really going to change my opinion of that person ? companies will not use data they found on orkut as a metier of the person. if they do, their HR department has to be the worst in the world. if people i don’t know – and will not meet – see a fake profile of me – does their opinion of me affect me ? if they are willing to form an opinion of me without ever meeting me/emailing me/chatting with me, what does that say about them ? communities exist that degrade others, but then they exist in real life – and have way more effect than on orkut, of all places.
as far as other online services i use go, they probably contain a lot more personal and sensitive information than i would like to admit. however, i either trust their assurances and use them. or i don’t use anything online at all.
dark times lie ahead, true. too many people use things they have no idea about. or have the inclination to learn about. they will allow problems to develop, maybe even cause them through misuse, and then cause devolution.
and thats the part i hate the most.
staying online
Nov 13th
Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts
the first time i went online was in my dad’s office. in 1997. i discovered online games, the sheer amount of tripe, and how to browse that day. it was almost magical. when allowed to, we could even surf the net in school. 20 boys, and one computer. entering stuff in a VSNL terminal, using PPP.. seemed so cool.
i still remember the highlight of my 10th standard vacation.
my dad got me the ‘internet’.
’twas the year of 1998; and the internet revolution was coming to india. 3 months later, i was receiving over 40 mails a day; an effect of signing up for some 20 mailing lists. i had an email id with ETH internet. 9 months later, i moved the subscriptions to a newly created yahoo! id. which also became the hub of my IM life; which until then was an offshoot of my dad’s id. both Y! and MSN were equally primitive at that stage. and were equally preferred. i was unique in owning one id for both networks. the magic of passport accounts is, incidentally, yet to dawn on a large majority.
ETH became dishnet, and we stuck with them. they were days of 800 bucks as a minimum package. the exact number of online minutes eludes me at this point. downloading was a pain, to say the least. 2.4 kbps was possibly the highest i had seen until the year 2000. movies were to be watched in theatres, until some tv channel deigned to air them. hbo/star movies weren’t the behemoths of licensing they are today. the mailing lists were removed, spam had made its impact felt. comics remained.. and still do.
i joined college, and MTNL had entered the fray of providing internet. they started with 3 months of “free” internet – in that you only had to pay the phone bill, and no add-on charges of internet usage. wonder of wonders, 5 kbps ! magic ! that obviously stopped, and we went on to switch to VSNL. dishnet services had started to suck. downloading was still a pain, kazaa had made an entry to show us the wonders of p2p. that it crashed on startup was overlooked. a distinguished few had cablenet, they were the source of all things good and evil available to download on the internet. there was also IIT, but that was a whole different ball game. they talked of tunnelling, and ftp servers – which were a pipe dream.
at some point during 2003, back in the hinterland of bombay, we decided to go cabled. for internet. finally. it took a while, but we had the excuse of cheap cabled internet that bhawani provided us in chembur, bombay. speeds were up to 20 kbps if we were lucky, and the router 2 blocks away was working fine. kazaa lite was permanent, spyware/malware was a looming threat. i was online 24/7, literally. college from 9-9 ? satish is still ‘online’. thanks to the magic of messenger plus!, i was privy to features that seemed almost magical for the, once again, uninitiated majority.
i discovered torrents, figured out the potential, and blessed the creators of suprnova. afternoons were spent watching that progress bar move faster than ever before.
college was finished, and i embarked on my sojourn to the UK. for a few months there, being online was reduced to weekends in the library. a secondhand desktop was acquired, and adsl modem hooked up, and i was back online. torrents became the be-all and end-all of virtual possessions. as a simple stat, we downloaded over 500 GB in the next 10 months. we managed to upload 450 GB of that as well 
and all this time, i was online. multimessengers enabled us all to be online. friends and family remained struck by the sheer omniscience of my online presence. Y! and MSN had evolved to becoming obese and irritating. ‘winks’ are possibly the most frustrating things to have been integrated into MSN. Y! had managed to convert their larger number of features into a larger number of bugs.
we shifted house in the UK. i acquired a laptop. still online. still available all the time. nearly 3 years of being online 24/7. pretty impressive. Y! and MSN! were ditched, and gAIM remained. way lighter, way more extensible. my smirk when talking to people who had now gotten used to seeing me on the list.. only grew wider.
here i am now. the 3rd year of my continuous online presence nears an end. the magic has finally faded. Y! and MSN have integrated, but remain just as crappy. i switched away from gAIM to Y! – too many people seem to use it – over 130 friends on y! messenger now. i chat with 2 or 3 of them, irregularly. gtalk is preferred: lighter, sleeker, and most importantly: waaaay less “friends”. that’s going to change now, thanks to orkut. i’m hating it already.
am i still online 24/7 ? no. i cannot claim to be. and don’t want to, anymore. i come online for a few hours every day, almost always on gtalk. i screen my IMs, i knock on the preferred ones – there is a reason they are “preferred”. email, funnily, is actually preferred. i wonder if i could degenerate to actual letter writing. i find i have too much to do online – blogs, reading, calendars, assignments, mail.
i’ve possibly discovered the true use of the internet.
or have i ?
inter-confusion
Jul 13th
Posted by SEV in staying.aside
WLM and Y! are interoperable now… and i’m confused about the client. one’s sleek, one’s feature-filled. can’t export/import though. crap. everything else looks good.
guess i’m sticking to GAIM until i see more features.. that i want. nice concept though.
