Author: Mike Melanson

These days, all you ever hear about are iPhones, iPads, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and stuff like Gowalla and Foursquare. Do you ever wish you could just go back to a simpler, more linear, 2400 baud type of time? Well, there are a number of sites out there that can help you revisit your pre-Internet past as if it were enshrined in resin and on display at the ancient history museum.

And at some of these online museums, you can not only look, but you can touch – we’re talking door games, DOS games, ANSI drawings and more.

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The Early Web – The Truth (About Your Bad Web Design) Is Out There

The Wayback Machine is all the evidence you’ll ever need that you, too, once totally sucked at Web design. It’s like the Internet yearbook you never really asked for and a great way to see how websites have developed over time.

The site has “over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.” The site uses data from Alexa, and gives you snapshots of websites at various stages in their life cycle, beginning usually with the site’s conception on the Web.

That first, test website you built in Microsoft Frontpage? Yeah, it still, sorta exists in some incarnation on the Wayback Machine.

The BBS Days

Stepping back a little further into the history of the Internet past, we find BBSes, those dial-up messaging, file transfer, chatroom, “door game” communities that predated websites and the Internet as we’ve come to know it.

And honestly, in some ways, the Web as we now see it has become more and more like those gathering places of yore. Websites like Facebook and Myspace are oddly remniscent and represent more of a come-full-circle experience than a revolution in online experiences.

Making Old Friends

So, if you aren’t friends with your old BBS pals on Facebook yet, you might be able to find them on BBSmates, a list of more than 75,000 BBSes and the people that ran and used them. (I’m in there, somewhere, but I’ll let you try to find that embarassing nugget of my BBS years.)

Aside from taking credit for your exploits as Co-SysOp on that one BBS for six months, you can fill your hankering for a little game of Global Wars, Baron Realms Elite and even Usurper.

BBS Source Codes, Door Games and Even ANSI Art

BBS Archives makes you feel like you’ve entered the late 90s from the second the site loads and it has all the files to back it up. From ACiD, the ANSI art group that’s been around since 1990, to executables for L.O.R.D. and every other game you can remember, this throwback site (with its gradient fade background image) will take you right back to the days of modem init strings and BBS meets.

And please, for the sake of all of us, download that Renegade or WWIV BBS code, get it running, and lets get some Trade Wars going.

Before Text Became Hypertextual

Going even a little bit deeper into the early days of the online world we have textfiles.com, the one stop shop for everything ASCII.

The site describes itself as offering “a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them. The focus is on mid-1980’s textfiles and the world as it was then, but even these files are sometime retooled 1960s and 1970s works, and offshoots of this culture exist to this day.”

We’re talking everything from those “Anarchy texts” you showed off to your friends in school to those terrible hacker group zines you and your friends made in Word Perfect. If you thought you were cool then, wait until you read this stuff now!

Nevermind AR: We’ve Got Scorched Earth

Last, but surely not least, we find ourselves with a DOS emulator for Windows made especially for game play called D-Fend Reloaded, that we found over at Lifehacker and admittedly started this whole Internet/BBS remniscing tirade.

With help from sites like DOSGames.com you can get your game on, with classics such as Scorched Earth and Nethack.

And if all of these websites and tools aren’t enough, we’d recommend checking out BBS: The Documentary for a full look at the way things were.

Oh, and did I mention – welcome back to your online childhood?

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Now that we’ve finally embarked on a future of tablet computing (didn’t we do that ten years ago?) with the iPad, we immediately got to wondering: What does iPad adoption look like across the country? Luckily, online ad network Chitika has offered some numbers on what its seeing for iPads broken down over time and state by state.

Chitika took a look at where and when it was seeing hits from iPads and built a real-time page to show you what’s going on with the release of the latest and greatest in Internet gadgetry.

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According to Chitika, there are just around 300,000 iPads now in the wild, a number that jives pretty well with Apple’s own estimate. Of those, 22% were first seen by Chitika today, with just under 100,000 hitting the open Internet on Saturday, the iPad’s release date.

Looking at the map of iPad adoption, the company quickly declares that “it looks like California is running away with the title of ‘iPadest State in America,’ with more than double the iPads of any other single state” but we content that the District of Columbia has the highest concentration of iPads by far, with one iPad for every 2,019 people. Following the District of Columbia are Hawaii, with one for every 2,785, and Nevada, with one for every 2,901. Rounding out the very bottom of the list are Iowa, with one for every 29,489, and Montana, with one for every 27,857 people.

Looking purely at the number of iPads, however, California leads with nearly 20%, New York follows with 8%, Texas with just under 8% and Florida with 6%.

Again, on percentages, the three states where you are least likely to see an iPad in the wild? Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana, all with less than 2% of all iPads combined.

To keep track of how the iPad dispersion plays out, check out Chitika’s real-time numbers. The company’s methodology is detailed in its blog.

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Nearly a full half-hour into the darkness this morning and we were beginning to wonder if it was time to break out the hurricane candles and board games – the world seemed to suddenly slow down and it had, dramatically. Twitter, you see, died on us this morning.

While we’re used to seeing the intermittent Fail Whale, the outage this morning lasted a solid 24 minutes according to the company, affecting both the website and API.

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In reality, the outage is not something new or even all that rare for the microblogging service, but normally we expect it to happen around highly trafficked Internet events, such as the iPad launch this weekend. But this outage, smack dab in the middle of the Monday morning news cycle, caught us completely off guard and we found ourselves wondering – where do you go when Twitter goes down?

Now, we don’t mean to be making a mountain out of a molehill here, and this certainly wasn’t like the four hour outage of last October, but it reminded us of our reliance on Twitter as a primary source of real-time communication, information and interaction.

Part of the problem we found this morning was that, especially when the API goes down too, our redundancy fails. We rely, in many ways, on our Twitter contacts list for our professional interactions and immediate, real-time communications. Normally, the website goes down but our trusty third-party clients keep on working. And many of the other sites we use simply pipe in our Twitter stream, joining it with other streams.

How can you ask the masses where to go and what to do when your megaphone is suddenly silenced? The extent to which Twitter has become the go-to source for real-time updates and mass responses suddenly became all too apparent.

Facebook we use more as a personal social network, Myspace was long ago abandoned and FriendFeed, what used to be the old standby when Twitter went down, remained a virtual ghost town during the outage this morning. Can Google Buzz pick up the slack when Twitter keels over? Or can we flip on over to Identi.ca to keep in touch? What sort of redundancy do you have built in to your social networks?

So, we had to wonder – where do you go when the Twitter lights go out? Or do you just hunker down and enjoy the silence for that sweet 24 minutes, like you might use a dusting of snow as an excuse to not drive to work that day?

As for the outage, there has been no word from the company on the cause, either on its blog or Twitter account and our emails received no response. We’ll just have to chalk it up to an overflow of iPad gushing in the meantime.

Update: Twitter says that it doesn’t know the exact cause of the issue yet, but says that it was an internal issue.

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Nevermind complicated algorithms and personalized content streams according to past search patterns and the like – Google has, for only the second time in its history, decided to offer specific results, a sort of guidance, in response to select search terms.

When users search for phrases such as “ways to commit suicide” or “suicidal thoughts”, they now see the toll-free number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at the top of their results. We have to wonder – when will Google advise users buying cigarettes to seek help too?

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The New York Times quotes Dr. Roni Zeiger, the chief health stategist for Google, as saying that the idea came from a Google user.

“A mother wrote in a suggestion to us — her daughter had swallowed something that she thought was dangerous, and she had a hard time finding poison control,” Dr. Zeiger said. “Now when you search for poison control or similar queries, we make it straightforward to find the number for poison control.”

So can we be as callous here as to wonder where else the company might take this? Can anyone really take issue with a company offering the phone number of a suicide prevention hotline to those looking up phrases like “I want to die”?

Perhaps this could be a new direction – rather than simply offering results directly related to a user’s query, or looking to personalize content by looking at what friends and peers are looking at, or even looking at a users history, Google could offer up a Devil’s Advocate set of results on every query. Looking for a brand new SUV? While you’re at it, why not consider this beautiful, used bicycle that will help save the environment? Cheap cigarettes? Didn’t you mean Nicorette gum? McDonalds? Why yes, we do have a few diet programs and some instructions on healthy eating.

In reality, we think that this could be a great compliment to all those apps and engines out there that simply look to show you exactly what you’re looking for before you ever even get to searching. Let’s use the web to challenge ideas, not simply echo them. As long as results are clearly identified, is there a problem?

While this is a loaded area to look at (questioning Google’s action can be made to seem as if it were a promotion of suicide) we still think there are interesting implications to its actions that should be considered. Do we want Google to simply act as a firehose of data or can we expect it to tailor its results to do better for the world? And who’s version of better will it go by if we do? What do you think?

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I think I’ve decided – the iPad just isn’t for me. I move around too much. I’m an on-the-go type of guy, and for that I’ve already found my two trusty devices – my 12″ netbook and my iPhone. Between the two, I have everything I need, but maybe that’s the problem with all of us techies, tech writers and early adopters, us serious content creators and code-o-philes, looking at and reviewing these new devices: they’re just not for us.

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This post is part of a pro/con series written with ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, who argues that he waited a year to buy an iPhone, and this time, he’s going to be first in line. Click here to read his counter-point article Life’s Too Short: I’m Getting an iPad Right Away.

The iPad is for that 75% to 85% of the rest of the population, the couch sitters and TV watchers, the full-time employees who don’t blog, code or anything of the sort. They watch videos, read articles, send quick notes to friends and family on Facebook, play some online Scrabble and call it a day. The iPad is for the average Internet user.

For me, the more technical, content creator type of user, the iPhone and netbook combination is where it’s at. On the go, the iPhone can handle quick microblogging, photos, chatting, location-based services, video, information retrieval and even very basic content creation and interaction, with things like the Facebook app. Unlike the netbook, it’s always on and readily available in my side pocket.

The netbook is the perfect compliment to the iPhone. It weighs three pounds, is about an inch thick at its widest point, and it has a few of my favorite, most used features – a mouse (with both a right and left button), a keyboard (nearly full-sized, even), a web cam (though I’m not personally big for being on camera) and multitasking. If I’m going to actually sit myself down and get on the Internet, I’m going to be doing five things at once, likely typing like a madman the whole while. I’m cutting and pasting, switching from one app to another, one tab to another, and editing photos along the way.

So my question becomes, where does the iPad fit into this equation? The answer for me is “nowhere”.

But I certainly don’t think that the answer is “nowhere” for all of us.

The iPad will make the perfect coffee table item, the ideal traveling media center and the great reading-on-the-train-to-work solution. It will be an always-on device that you reach for quickly, when you want to know a mid-conversation answer or you’re sitting around watching TV and want to visit the website that just popped on screen.

But, until it will compete with my netbook, as Steve Jobs so aptly pointed out it wasn’t going to do, it won’t be doing anything for me.

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Twitter turned on its new “popular” tweets feature in its search page last night, bubbling the three most popular tweets to the top of any search result. Previously, search results were only offered according to time, not any form of relevancy.

In addition to the search feature showing up on search.twitter.com, the functionality has been turned on in Twitter’s search API, so we’re likely to see this sort of thing showing up in third-party clients soon, as well.

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Don’t be confused if popular search results aren’t showing up when you search directly from the Twitter homepage – you need to specifically go to search.twitter.com for these new results to come up. For some reason, searching from the right-hand sidebar gives only results ordered by time.

From the Twitter API Google Group on how tweets will be ordered:

With this new project, we want to make real-time search even more valuable by surfacing the best tweets about a particular topic, by considering recency, but also the interactions on a tweet. This means analyzing the author’s profile, as well as the number times the tweet has been retweeted, favorited, replied, and more. It’s an evolving algorithm that we’ll be iterating on & tuning until practically the end of time.

While the Twitter search returns only three results, the API should return more if desired. The API is opt-in, as we wrote last time, and offers the ability to get only new results, only popular results, or a mix.

We’re immediately wondering how this might be used with the geocoding variable. Will we see similar functionality to the location trending on Foursquare or Gowalla? What does mean to identify tweets as singular hubs of conversation, like we see with Techmeme? Trending topics are just that – topics surrounded by many tweets. This makes the focus center not around many people talking about a topic, but instead a few tweets that many people are centering around. We know we’ve seen similar implementations with the likes of TweetMeme, but now that it’s in the API, what will we see next?

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Location, location, location. That’s the common refrain about how to have a successful business, right? Well, now it’s the common refrain of mobile app developers, too, and the song is reaching a crescendo this week, with Where 2.0, the location-based everything conference going on in San Jose.

Today, Skyhook Wireless is announcing a software developers kit called “Local Faves”, which will help developers to add location to any iPhone app. So for those of you saying “Location, location, location”, we say, get to it.

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Similar to SimpleGEO, a more robust service that offers location data storage, formatting and even a marketplace for location data. The Local Faves SDK, on the other hand, looks like a simple way to add location to an app, and that’s that.

From the company on what it expects the SDK to be used for:

Developers traditionally use location in apps that are tied to the physical environment, like navigation, social networking, weather, and search. Local Faves is designed to bring the context of location to digital content-based apps, like music, wine, food, reference, books, and more. […] Local Faves features fully customizable content tagging, allowing users to indicate that that they loved, hated, ‘favorited’, saw, or read a piece of content within an app, and enables sharing of this content, and exactly where it was experienced, via Facebook and Twitter.

To all of this, we have to say “If you got it, use it.” Why not add location when you can? Why keep location separate and quarantined for specific mobile apps and not others? We know we said we wouldn’t be using Twitter’s web-based location, but adding location to any and all mobile apps (as an opt-in feature, of course) seems like common sense.

Although the company hasn’t offered any specifics on what platforms this will be available for, a report the company put out earlier this month would appear to hint at its intentions at growing the location market for all platforms.

Skyhook Wireless says that AppMakr plans on adding its SDK’s features to its platform for news apps and points to several other apps, such as Audobon Guides, where it plans to see it used. The Local Faves SDK will be available for developers in mid-April – and you can sign up to find out when.

Don’t miss the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California! We’re at a key point in the history of mobile computing right now – we hope you’ll join us, and a group of the most innovative leaders in the mobile industry, to discuss it.

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The news is all over the Web – Netflix is coming to the iPad! For all of you doubters and naysayers, you can put away your beloved netbooks, laptops and miniature iPads (iPhones) and…oh, wait, is this true? It might all be an April Fool’s Day joke that’s getting repeated by trusted media around the Web?

But this Netflix on the iPad thing is the perfect example of how half-believable information can be put out there and repeated and repeated until everyone thinks it’s true. And it might be.

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Now, this isn’t to say that we don’t have a sense of humor about this whole day. XKCD is hilarious for us old geeks who still actually see and use command-line interfaces. And do we believe, even for a millisecond, that Opera is releasing a special edition of its browser for space? Not at all, but it’s amusing.

The first to report that a Netflix iPad app would be available this Saturday, the same day as the iPad launch, was iPhone app blog App Advice, with the headline “Exclusive: It’s Official – Netflix Streaming on the iPad“.

Right off the bat, commentors asked if it was an April Fools joke, but the article’s author gave a round-about, if evasive, denial that seemed to appease them. That and some screen shots seemed enough to pass the article on to some bigger fish, like PC World, which was then picked up by The Houston Chronicle and the Silicon Alley Insider. Endgadget and Gizmodo took the more common route of leak and rumor reporting, which was to acknowledge from the get-go a healthy dose of skepticism about the whole thing. And now, in big, bold lettering, the original article is on Techmeme, our trusted go-to source of what the tech world is talking about each day.

Our own Sarah Perez wrote about Netflix for the iPhone and iPad earlier this month, when all signs seemed to point to “no”. We gave Steve Swasey, the VP for Communications at Netflix, a call this morning and he said that the company doesn’t comment on rumor and speculation. He then called us back, adding that “Today’s April Fools Day, tomorrow’s Good Friday – let’s see what Saturday brings.”

This surely left us scratching our heads and wondering if either this was a great scoop or if Netflix was in on the joke.

So, in the meantime, if this is a big, not all that elaborate hoax, then it can be added to the number of other reasons people use to say that new media cannot be trusted. And if it isn’t, then good on you, AppAdvice, for breaking a sweet story, but we’re still going to say that perhaps April Fools Day is a terrible idea for new media and press of any kind to get involved in.

Do we see the New York Times getting in on the fun? No. Is that because the folks over there don’t have a sense of humor? Not at all. It’s because, in order to be a trusted source of information, we need to present only trusted and true information, as much as we possibly can, 100% of the time. Not 364 days out of the year, but 365.

TechCrunch even stepped into the mix with a story on how Google is getting into the nuclear power business. If you read the article, it’s obviously a joke, but then again, how many people don’t read articles and just repeat headlines? And Google is in the power business, is it not?

It is entirely because of the fact that online information sources now feel that it is acceptable to post “April Fools Jokes” that we find ourselves looking at this news in complete disbelief. Make YouTube videos show up upside-down. Turn XKCD into a command-line interface. Pretend that all Reddit users suddenly have admin capabilities. Short sheet your sibling’s bed. Tie your friend’s shoes together. Convince your parents you’re moving to Mexico. Fine.

But if this Netflix for iPad story is indeed an April Fools Joke then its yet another blow against seeing online media as trustworthy. It would also reflect rather poorly on Netflix, a company with a reputation outside of techie circles that could be damaged if it allowed a false rumor make its way into the hands of trusted media without squashing it, simply to get more press mentions.

And on the other hand, if it’s not? Awesome. Netflix for the iPad sounds great and we’d really, really love to see it on the iPhone too, while we’re at it – but maybe an announcement before April 1st would have been nice.

Don’t miss the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California! We’re at a key point in the history of mobile computing right now – we hope you’ll join us, and a group of the most innovative leaders in the mobile industry, to discuss it.

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Microsoft is announcing two new features to Bing Maps today – an integration with Oodle to show rental property listings and another integration with Foursquare to visualize check-ins, tips and a variety of other data.

Although the two seem only related by the map visualization aspect, they might be useful hand in hand to find that new apartment that’s close to where everything (or nothing) is going on.

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First, the Oodle map application, called Oodle Rentals, is similar to other mashups we’ve seen using Google Maps and Craigslist, such as HousingMaps. Hopefully Oodle Rentals doesn’t have the same downfall, however, wherein rental agencies simply post listings with a zip code and no actual address, meaning you have 300 pins smack dab in the center of down and not where they really are.

The application shows a listing of appropriate properties in a sidebar, allowing you to filter by criteria like pets, bedrooms, bathroom, rent and so on. As you move the map around, the available and appropriate properties appear on the map.

As for “foursquare Everywhere”, Foursquare data is pulled in, allowing visualization of check-ins, tips, badges and mayor “coronations” worldwide. So after you’ve found the perfect place to rent using Oodle Rentals, you can switch over to “foursquare Everywhere” and see where the happening night clubs, coffee shops, restaurants and various other venues are in the area.

We have to say, we’re fans of anything that suddenly offers a better visualization of what would otherwise be data we’d have to correlate on our own. Who wants to look through rental listings and then switch over and look it all up in a map? That’s so 2000, not 2010. Now, if they would just get to offering a SimCity style view of map filtering, so we could see crime rates, traffic, pollution, noise, all aggregated together with rental listings and check-in data, then we’d be talking.

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If you’ve ever lived in a house with multiple roommates, then you know the pain of collecting for the various bills each month and keeping track of who paid what and when. Add to that the frustration of one person paying cash while another only has checks on hand, and you’ll be ready to call it quits.

That is, unless you’ve found WePay, the online payment service launching tomorrow custom made to handle situations like roommates, teams, organizations or any group where everyone pitches in.

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The company has been in private beta for the past six months and says that its testers have been giving it rave reviews. If it does what it says it does, we wouldn’t see why not.

So far, it has received funding from August Capital, Max Levchin (the founder of PayPal), Ron Conway (early investor in Google, Facebook and Twitter), Eric Dunn (former CTO and CFO of Intuit), and others.

WePay allows its users to set up shared financial accounts with varying levels of access for different users, giving them a way to manage group payments and finances. Asking your roommates to pay the monthly Internet bill doesn’t have to be a scrap of paper on the kitchen counter or a pocketful of unrolled coins, it can be an automated email and electronic payment.

The group accounts are FDIC-insured and can make payments by a WePay VISA prepaid card, paper checks and electronic transfers. Of course, the way WePay makes money in all of this is by taking a little bit of each transaction. According to the company, it collects “as little as 50 cents per transaction”.

On the other end of it, for the people paying into a group pot, WePay also offers some transparency, as they can watch where their collected funds are being spent. After having spent some years in cooperative living environments, this services sounds like a dream come true.

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By the year 2020, the big players in cloud computing and big data could consume more power than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined, says environmental advocacy group Greenpeace in a report released today. The group is calling for technology companies that require large data centers to begin using renewable energy sources, warning that “the growth of Internet computing could come with a huge jump in greenhouse gas emissions”.

Greenpeace is calling attention to a central flaw in the duality of technology – its ability to help the world while, at the same time, running off the same old, dirty, polluting power sources that harm it.

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The report, entitled “Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change”, “shows how the launch of quintessential cloud computing devices like the Apple iPad, which offer users access to the ‘cloud’ of online services like social networks and video streaming, can contribute to a much larger carbon footprint of the Information Technology (IT) sector than previously estimated.”

The report highlights Facebook’s recent commissioning of a data center in Oregon, which is powered primarily by coal, “the United States’ largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.” Yahoo!, on the other hand, “chose to build a data centre outside Buffalo, New York, that is powered by energy from a hydroelectric plant – dramatically decreasing its carbon footprint.” Google, it notes, has been “recently approved as a regulated wholesale buyer and seller of electricity”, meaning any power it creates that it cannot use it can sell back to the power companies.

Greenpeace is using statistics from Smart 2020, a 2008 study that found that changes within the ICT sector could reduce “15% of business as usual emissions”. As a result of rapid expansion in places like India and China, “demand for ICT services will quadruple by 2020”.

The release of the report comes just days before Apple’s release of the iPad, a device that will assuredly run off cloud-based services, and just weeks after Microsoft said it was betting the farm on the cloud.

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Several news outlets are reporting this morning that China has finally blocked Google’s search engine completely. This follows Google’s move earlier this month, wherein the search engine giant moved its search engine service in China to Hong Kong, in hopes of taking advantage of the “One Country, Two Systems” policy that separates mainland China from recently returned Hong Kong.

As the Chinese government does not comment on their practice of specific censorship, only user reports are available, and they appear to be spotty and varied.

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According to the Shanghaiist, any search, political or inane, on both Google.cn and Google.com.hk were met with a “connection reset” and even a search for “shanghai” was met with “the white screen of death”.

The local Shanghai blog also quoted some as saying that a possible reason for the block might be the inclusion of the letters “RFA” in the Google URL parameters. RFA can stand for “Radio Free Asia”, a site that is also blocked in China.

UPDATE: According to a statement from Google earlier today, the inclusion of those letters was indeed the case for the blockage.

“In the last 24 hours “gs_rfai” started appearing in the URLs of Google searches globally as part of a search parameter, a string of characters that sends information about the query to Google so we can return the best result. Because this parameter contained the letters rfa the great firewall was associating these searches with Radio Free Asia, a service that has been inaccessible in China for a long time – hence the blockage. We are currently looking at how to resolve this issue.”

According to the AFP, their reporters in Shanghai were able to use Google’s search engine without incident, even getting search results on sensitive terms like “Falungong” and “Dalai Lama”. For those results, however, the resulting links were blocked, as has been the case. The Shanghaiist also reported two Twitterers, in Suzhou and Shanghai, who reported being able to access Google.

The page tracking Google’s sites availability has yet to update to show any change.

It would also seem plausible that even the term “Google” itself is being filtered out by the Great Firewall of China and causing problems using the search engine. When I was in Beijing during the time around the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, simple things like advertisements in Yahoo! Mail and oft-seen widgets were showing up blocked and giving errors due to increased censorship.

At the same time, we have to ask – would it really be all that surprising if China had finally decided it had had enough and would put the brakes on the whole situation?

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In a memo to its advertisers, Facebook quietly announced that it would change the phrase “Become A Fan” to “Like” in what, at times, seems like an ongoing effort to confuse and enrage its users. “Like” has had a very specific, while malleable, usage for Facebook users and changing it to gear towards advertisers and Fan Page subscriptions is deceptive.

Not only does the move seem like a confusing one for users, but it opens up their actions to the public, as becoming a fan of something is completely public to all who view your profile.

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While the memo says that “users will understand the distinction through explicit social context, messaging and aesthetic differences”, we expect that the majority of users will only find out the difference between liking now and liking then when they “Like” something that suddenly bombards their feed with stories and advertisements.

The memo offers an example of how an ad for a page will look with the “language change”.

According to an article in Clikz on the change, the memo also points out that “Facebook users have been clicking the current ‘Like’ feature nearly twice as often as the ‘Become A Fan’ button”. The reason, it seems to us, is apparent – clicking “Like” was a quick and easy way to convey approval, support or other simple sentiment, not a way to commit to being a fan and subscribing to news updates in their News Feed for perpetuity.

“Like” offers a light-weight, consistent way for users to connect with the things they are passionate about. This lighter-weight action for connection to a Page on Facebook means that users will be making more connections across the site, including your Facebook Page.

Changing what Facebook has identified as a “lighter-weight action” into an action that deeper implications is at the core of what we find deceptive here. Was there anything wrong with the language of “Become A Fan”?

With that language, it was clear that there was a separation from any time I might “Like” something. I would be connected to that Page and would receive updates in my News Feed. It would show up, publicly, to anyone and everyone that viewed my page on the Internet, as a result of the privacy changes to the site last December.

Were users clicking on “Become A Fan” less for a reason? Likely so – they didn’t want to subscribe to that particular content in their news feed and, if they understood the privacy implications, because they didn’t want to broadcast to the world what they saw as private thoughts and opinions.

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Nearly 15 years ago, libraries were still primarily a place to go check out the printed, bound word. Only 28% offered Internet access, whereas today, almost all public libraries offer access and are helping to bridge the digital divide, according to a report by the University of Washington on Internet use in libraries across the country.

According to the report, “The wiring of public libraries has transformed one of the nation’s most established community resources into a critical digital hub”.

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Every year, 169 million people visit their local public library and 45% of them access the Internet, according to the report. The report, which focuses on the numbers of people 14-years old and older, is based on nearly 50,000 surveys from patrons of more than 400 public libraries across the country.

As Seth Godin pointed out last January, libraries “can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own” and that the “number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals.”

Now, we can add “Internet access” to the top of the list, as “Internet access is now one of the most sought after public library services,” according to the report.

The report notes that patrons use the Internet for a variety of tasks – from job searches to civic participation to finance to school kids doing their homework – but offers an interesting stat right off the bat: Of those people using the Internet at the library, “more than three-quarters of these people had Internet access at home, work, or elsewhere.”

The library, it would seem, offers a respite from the coffee shop, a refuge from familial fights over the single home computer and an alternative to the dizzyingly slow dial-up Internet that so many still have to deal with. But what are they doing with this new found Internet provider?

Another telling number was that 60% of respondents said they use library computers to maintain “social connections,” and we can’t help but wonder if libraries are giving people a safe place to Facebook-lurk. That is, many places of employment and schools ban social networks – are libraries a way around that for workers and teens?

Overall though, the report does seem to show that libraries are a “technological lifeline to children and families in need”, with 44% of people in households below the federal poverty line using public libraries for Internet access. And while we may make fun of Facebook occasionally, social networking can be a key tool in finding employment and networking. But beyond that, we can see that employment, education and health information are among the top use cases.

In the end, the report calls for continued support for a public system that seems to be the biggest bridge for the digital divide. It is certainly a shift in focus, but we hope that any hard feelings over digital taking away from the printed word don’t get in the way of keeping public libraries funded.

As the report reads, “The findings signal this is a moment when federal, state, and local governments should invest more, not less, in the computing capacity of the nation’s libraries to help advance a wide range of policy goals.”

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In what seems like a bit of round about pressure on Apple to let Opera Mini into the App Store for the iPhone, Opera is announcing today that “Opera Mini is money”.

The company said in its blog this morning that its mobile browser, Opera Mini, has generated more than $1.2 billion per year for mobile operators.

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The report, which the company pulls from its monthly “State of the Mobile Web Report“, seems clearly aimed at letting AT&T know that its browser brings in the big bucks and that perhaps the company should give Apple a little nudge. Currently, Apple only allows Safari to operate as a browser on the iPhone and all other browser apps are simply overlays on top of Apple’s native browser.

Opera says in its post that its Opera Mini users generate nearly $4 billion in revenue for mobile operators, using $1 per megabyte as a standard.

The quote from Jon von Tetzchner, Opera’s co-founder, says it all.

“We like to think of Opera Mini as a win-win solution. Consumers who would otherwise not pay for the mobile Web can do so without fear of ‘sticker shock’ when they see their bill. People paying for a flat-rate data plan can enjoy quick and hassle-free browsing over EDGE or 3G connections. Operators attract new customers for their data packages, and their strained networks can catch their breath while our servers do the heavy lifting.”

“Who could pass up such an opportunity?” Opera seems to be saying. And for iPhone users, who are required to buy an unlimited data plan, the winner here would be AT&T, because Opera uses a compression system that the company claims can compress data by up to 90%. For some iPhone apps, like Skype and Sling, overuse of the 3G network was a claimed concern. With compression, AT&T could serve up the same or better experience while using less bandwidth.

In case you were wondering, it’s been just over six days and three hours since Opera submitted its mini browser to the App Store.

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On the one hand, when we hear about Facebook making Facebook Connect an opt-out experience, we feel a little chill run through our bones and we want to commit Facebook suicide. And then again, every time we hear about another big player on the web implementing Facebook Connect, we smile, because for us and so many others, our Facebook friend list is our de facto representation of our real-life friends on the Web.

YouTube this weekend announced that it would be stepping up its Facebook integration, allowing you to see what YouTube videos all of your friends are sharing on Facebook.

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It’s only been since last December that the video-sharing site has had Facebook Connect capabilities, but now, as YouTube says in its blog, “when you log in to your YouTube account, you’ll get a prominent invitation in the Recent Activity module (see below) to connect to Facebook, which we highly recommend that you do. In fact, we hope to integrate more social networks with YouTube going forward”.

The blog also highlights “real-time sharing”, saying that now, when you share YouTube videos on other social networks, it happens immediately and not 10 minutes later. We have to imagine that this has lowered the number of exasperated support requests from impatient users, as we’ve all come to expect things to happen instantaneously and not when the server feels like getting around to it.

As for sharing, users can automatically share videos they post on YouTube to Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. This new feature twists around the usual, making it possible for users to see what their friends are sharing on Facebook. In this case, it does not mean that they have to create the video for you to see it – if they share it, you can see that.

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After going off a bit this morning on how content personalization and recommendation engines can be the death of free thought and lively debate, we figured we’d send you off into the weekend with a fun little gadget we found in the process – a social recommendation service for Foursquare called Meet Gatsby.

Meet Gatsby works alongside Foursquare, keeping track of your check-ins, making recommendations when people with similar interests check in nearby.

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We’re immediately reminded of Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) as we are cordially greeted by Gatsby when we arrive at the site. Gatsby, you see, is here to help you, personally, meet like-minded people while your out on the town.

“Hi, I’m Gatsby,” reads the site. “I’ll introduce you to nearby people with interests you share, whenever you check in on Foursquare.”

Signing up for the service takes five minutes, tops, and you’re ready to go. Simply sign up with your Foursquare account, add interest keywords and a phone number, and you’re ready to go. Immediately, you’ll receive a text saying “Hi, I’m Gatsby. I’ll be texting you from this number when I find matches for you nearby.”

From there, all you need to do is check in with Foursquare and Meet Gatsby will handle the rest.

When we discussed Robert Scoble’s blog entry this morning on how location based services need to use a malleable social graph to remain competitive, it was precisely this type of service that he alluded to and we agreed on.

Games and virtual items will not keep Foursquare, Gowalla or any of the other LBS out there afloat, but adding context and connection will. Meet Gatsby acts as a perfect layer on top of Foursquare to give it something it’s missing – a link to like-minded people around you.

From what we can see on the Meet Gatsby Twitter account, the service is relatively new and taking input on new features. It looks like we can look forward to some additional settings and functionality in the future, such as different match radii in different cities and Twitter DM notifications.

For now, it looks like a really interesting idea that we’re going to give a run out on the town this weekend. Meet you out there?

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Maybe we’re getting to be a bit of a broken record on this point, but a blog post this morning by Robert Scoble on how malleable social graphs could change the direction of location based services reminded us of the fine line we think we’re all walking.

Malleable social graphs, much like recommendation engines and customized searches, sound like the wave of the future, but we fear that they will, if improperly used, ensure that we never hear a disagreeable opinion or see something outside of our day-to-day ever again.

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Scoble’s Argument: LBS Dead In The Water Without Innovation

For much of Scoble’s post, we heartily agree: We are in the very early days of LBS and Facebook could easily squash services like Gowalla and Foursquare if done right. His suggestion for these services is to use what he calls “malleable social graphs”, that is, a set of connections that change in response to real-world conditions.

Some of his suggestions and criticisms are right on point, such as the opportunity Gowalla has to point someone checking in at a car wash to anything but a lamp store. Checking into the TV show “24” and chatting with other fans sounds like a great idea that Miso is on top of already, just as SuperGlued has taken center stage for aligning like-minded folks around live music events.

…And Then It All Goes Wrong

It’s when Scoble gets to suggesting that, because he identified himself as a Democrat on Facebook, he shouldn’t be shown any “Republican crap” in his news feed, that our spidey-sense starts to tingle.

Just as we argued when we found that Google was customizing one in five searches, all of this recommending, customizing and filtering, can put us into an idea echo chamber of sorts, where we only come across safe and previously approved, by our actions, opinions. But a part of what we like so much about Facebook is getting into debates with friends we might never get into in “real life”.

Go ahead and post a video of the Tea Baggers on your profile, say how absurd you think it is or how much you support it, and see what unexpected discussion ensues.

It may not end up being pretty, but maybe you’ll learn something – if everyone can keep it polite enough to actually exchange ideas and information. Unless we truly believe that one side is always right and another always wrong (a ridiculous proposition) then filtering out any content we may not agree with is sure to create even more people who believe they are absolutely right. After all, everything they read on the Internet tells them so.

…Or Does It?

Then again, when Scoble gets to talking about tastes and reviews, such as his refined taste for sushi versus those who like “fried crap [he] can’t even pronounce”, it starts to make sense again. Maybe it’s because the only thing at stake here is missing out on a good meal.

Here’s what happens: Yuzu is a place that is awesome for advanced sushi lovers. I’ve eaten sushi all over the world in places like Tokyo, Yokohama, New York, London, and other places. I love advanced sushi. I look for restaurants who do sushi well. But most people aren’t like me. Most people don’t even like sushi. So, if they get dragged to a place like this they try to order “Americanized” sushi like, um, California rolls. Or fried crap I can’t even pronounce. That is NOT sushi. Anyway, these people, er, newbies, get to Yuzu and find that all the other “non-sushi” stuff sucks. So they rate it low. Me? I could care less about all that other non-sushi stuff when I am looking for a sushi restaurant, which is why I rate this place five stars. Now, Yelp does NOT have a malleable social graph. We can’t filter out all the “sushi newbies” who don’t like sushi anyway.

Malleable social graphs, recommendation engines, customized searches and the like all have great uses and can be immensely powerful tools. We can find out about all sorts of things we might have missed because they would have otherwise been lost in the overwhelming stream of information. Using these sorts of tools in conjunction with LBS is where the industry needs to go, as Scoble argues, to stay afloat.

But once you return back to the ideological realm again, though, as with his argument about movie reviews, we feel that the stance gets a bit tenuous. Our fear, as we discussed when looking at recommendation engine My6Sense, is that people need to step outside these filters otherwise they will never see the unexpected and have their thoughts challenged.

And of course, this is not a black and white debate. It isn’t between either having content recommended or having the entirety of the Internet’s data blasted at you, full force. There are gradations and in-betweens, and maybe, sometimes, you just want to know what all of your friends are talking about. But even then, do you only want to know what your friends are talking about that you can be sure you agree with?

Different opinions, ideas, and their vigorous debate is essential to a free and developing society. On this point, we implore Facebook, Google, My6Sense, Twitter and everyone else – no matter how much our staunch Republican friends may annoy us, please don’t silence them. We’ll never get anywhere if you do.

One Last Thing

With all of that being said, we have to fess up to one, minor detail. Where did we find Scoble’s article? Was it in the unfiltered chaos that contains all of the different opinions of the world? Not at all.

It was, in fact, the third story down in our Twitter Times, a website that creates a custom, newspaper-style page, specifically personalized by looking at all of the links being tweeted and retweeted by all of the people you follow on Twitter.

So much for personalization killing debate, eh?

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It seems almost daily that we run across yet another friend who asks “So wait, what exactly is Twitter? What does it do? Why do I care?” Every time we get these questions, we have to pause, take a deep breath, and figure out why it is, exactly that this particular person would care.

It looks like Twitter itself has started to tackle this issue too, with its Clever Twitter Accounts blog on Posterous.

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Louis Gray first noticed the site, which he writes is “full of ‘Clever’ examples aimed to make you say, ‘Now I get it!’”. The site is put together by Sean Garrett, Twitter’s head of communications, and Jenna Sampson, a communications associate at Twitter. They have been posting different uses of Twitter since the beginning of the month, pretty much culling various media across the Internet looking for Twitter mentions, from the looks of it.

The blog starts out with how people used Twitter in Chile to find missing persons and moves on to a San Francisco specific Twitter account meant to receive 311 complaints.

Gray notes how most things Twitter does explode immediately in popularity, pointing to how many followers both @twitterapi and @twitter have, but so far @cleveraccounts, the account associated with the blog, hasn’t given us all that much to chew on quite yet.

So, while getting a nod on the “Clever Twitter Accounts” blog isn’t likely to tip your follower scales the way the now-deceased Suggested User List would have, we’ll be keeping an eye on it to see if any new twists on Twitter use pop up.

Maybe, the thing is, we already “get it”. If you have a friend who doesn’t appear to get it yet, though, send ’em on over. Maybe they’ll be convinced by knowing they can follow the Japanese prime minister or navigate New York’s busy streets – all with the help of Twitter.

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Lest we forget what is at stake with the situation involving Google and China, the Washington Post has published today a list of directions from the Chinese government sent out to all media outlets on how they are allowed to cover the incident. The rules are a stark reminder of why, no matter how long Google kowtowed to government demands there, the search engine’s actions are important for the development of a free society.

Obtained and translated by China Digital Times, the instructions specifically outline how traditional and new media may or may not approach the topic.

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The instructions start out highlighting how important Google’s actions are and how this importance is not to be emphasized to the public:

Google has officially announced its withdrawal from the China market. This is a high-impact incident. It has triggered netizens’ discussions which are not limited to a commercial level. Therefore please pay strict attention to the following content requirements during this period:

The first instruction really says it all: “Only use Central Government main media (website) content; do not use content from other sources.”

The Chinese government wants to stay on top of forming the message about Google and its place in China, as we saw with stories this past week about Google colluding with U.S. spies and being an agent of the U.S. government, not an agent of free thought, speech or change.

The instructions go on from there, directing media to use the government assigned title, refer only to government main media websites and control any and all discussion. The section on Internet media is particularly informative.

B. Forums, blogs and other interactive media sections:

1. It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the Google topic.

2. Interactive sections do not recommend this topic, do not place this topic and related comments at the top.

3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event.

4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy.

5. On topics related to Google, carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions.

Not only are websites required to closely follow the governmental opinion on the subject, but they are to keep conversation in check. No “conversations” or “investigations” are to be held and all related content is not to be placed in a prominent position.

In case you’re wondering through all of this what the Chinese government’s take on Google is, exactly, it’s that “Google Is Not God“. And according to these instructions, this sentiment is something that needs to be repeated by all Chinese media alike.

And you thought U.S. media could be a mouthpiece for corporate and governmental interests.

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