Blog category: Facebook

Now on Google+ | July 1st, 2011

I managed to get an invite for Google+ — invites to new websites are the nerd red carpet — so I’m trying this thing out. Count me in with the chorus that thinks it’s pretty well done for what it is, but when Facebook and Twitter have spent years refining the social model, I don’t yet see this as more than just another account to maintain. Considering how much time I spend on Gmail, though, that won’t be a high hurdle to clear, so G+ has more potential than most.

Meanwhile, I’m off to enjoy the big 235th birthday party this weekend. Thomas Jefferson FTW.

Pat’s 16 Best Android Apps | February 27th, 2011

Not too long ago, I was admittedly indifferent to this mobile thing, even as a professional digital dude. This was because:

1. I had BlackBerrys for work and found them useful but nothing revolutionary;
2. I mistakenly chalked the iPhone hype up to characteristic Apple-fan hyperventilation;
3. I stuck to my old clamshell phone because I’m really cheap.

Now that I’ve jumped to an Android smartphone, this HTC Incredible is practically grafted onto my hand. Why? It’s the dope applications. My friend Ben recently got one and asked me which ones to load up on his phone, so to spread the love around, I went with 16 of my favorites here to fill up your home screen. So load up your Android phone with these mugs — all of them free — and you’ll be set:

Gmail: Awesome job replicating the web experience. I also like using this app separate from the main mail app to keep my work / personal email divide simple.

Twitter: They hooked up their Android app. The HTC Peep app is kind of weak, and the native Android Twitter client does a cool job of syncing with your contacts, but this thing is well done. Each new release updates the functionality nicely, including a pretty well-done widget.

Yelp: No need for Google Maps when you hook this app up – finds local stuff based on your location, and the ratings make it easy to narrow down which one you want to try. It’s weird now to think of city life without Yelp – nice work, Eric.

Dolphin HD: It took three Android browsers before I settled on this one. The native Android browser is displays Flash and has good graphical capabilities, but it’s slow; Opera Mini is fast but can’t do Flash and isn’t great for images or fonts; but Dolphin HD is just right. I also like the gesture interface.

NPR News: You get the major news without headline overload in an easy-to-read text format, plus hourly audio news summaries and easy audio download for other pieces. Haters can hate, but I give props to NPR as a rare non-hyperbolic news outlet.

BBC News: With this and NPR, apparently I’m a sucker for taxpayer-funded news, but I reach for this app when I want to remember that there’s a world of news outside the United States. Thanks, hyperbolic news cycle.

Chicago Tribune: Finally, a news outlet that can stay afloat without government money. (Wait … nevermind.) This app is apparently still in beta, but I love it. I’ve been looking for a solid Chicago-centric app for my phone, and this one nails it – breaking headlines, further in-depth local news from the paper, the Opinion section that I now read a lot more often (even as John Kass’ political nicknames irk me) and handy weather on the app homepage.

The Weather Channel: Loads better than the crappy HTC weather app that comes loaded with the phone, and stays in your status bar for a constant look at the temperature. Could use some cooler animation, but has all the info I need heading out the door.

BeyondPod: Tried several podcasting clients; this one’s easily the best.

ESPN Scorecenter: I should probably look beyond ESPN for potential sports-score apps, but when this one has everything I need and a super-intuitive interface, there’s no point in bothering.

Out of Milk: Solid shopping-list app, and I’ve tried several. You can scan barcodes, easily sort your items and cross them off with a single long press.

WordPress: For maintaining an entire site on a 3×5 screen, you can’t beat this one.

Facebook: Gets all your FB needs in a FB-branded package that looks exactly like you’d want the mobile-fied version of Facebook to look. I also like that the widget is just status updates — FB’s made it hard to find those anymore.

Chase: I mentioned these guys as a positive example for work recently, because in digital-consultant speak, they’ve got the multi-channel touchpoint optimization thing down. You can get the same banking done whether you’re at the teller, ATM, website or phone site/app, each one in a channel-friendly format. The deposit-by-photo thing doesn’t work that well, but it’s still a cool idea.

People: It’s a native app, but I love the automatic Facebook and Twitter syncing, the ease of importing contacts from Google, and the contact formatting. (Though why can’t I enter a letter and jump ahead when browsing the list?)

NY Times: I might read NPR, the Trib and the BBC more often than the NYT these days, but I can’t hate on these guys’ ability to be out in front of the news industry on almost every interactive count. This is an even better newsreading experience than nytimes.com on the PC.

Bonus 17th item: Angry Birds: The rest are all apps, so I’ll justify squeezing one more in because it’s an awesomely addictive game. You just can’t front on the blue splittable bird flying out of the slingshot.

Also-rans: Pandora, Google Translate, American Express, Tumblr, Astro, IMDB, Epicurious, Kayak.

Facebook Celebrity Status Update | March 7th, 2009

I logged in to Facebook today and saw this in my News Feed:

“Don Graham and Albert Gore are now friends.”

The liberal media conspiracy is real?

Things | August 7th, 2007

• For a heavy but very good read, check out this New Yorker article on the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (h/t Mark.) For some reason we haven’t seen many big pieces mentioning the impact of extra-tough interrogation tactics—the euphemism bell just went off—on the interrogators themselves, but this piece notes that it’s not just the bad guys suffering psychological damage.
• On another note from the article, it seems that one argument for putting the detainees through a regular trial is the simple need to be able to put them somewhere. In the meantime, the best the government can do for the “What do we do with these guys once they’re not as immediately useful?” question seems to be a big shrug. If there’s not a court record of a trial and later sentencing, thirty years from now we’ll still be asking ourselves, “Why exactly are we still hiding a bunch of dangerous Arab and Pakistani guys in Poland when it would have been a lot easier to have just tried and sentenced them to our supermax in Colorado?”
• As much as today’s political climate can be depressing, it’s a lot easier to be 27 in 2007 than it was in 1917.
• One easy way to make your online comment / argument look less intelligent and original is to post song lyrics along with it. I was reading a dude’s critique of the media in some comments section recently and he posted the refrain to “March of the Pigs” by Nine Inch Nails, as if the creative effort of an artist who isn’t you is a good stand-in for using things like applicable facts, reason and logic to show that you know stuff.

  Nope.

• This past week saw a mild embarrassment for Rudy Giuliani’s campaign thanks to his daughter’s Facebook membership in “One million strong for Barack”. Meanwhile, it seems that every editor I know from either TIME or Slate (I just gotta use internal title style—force of habit) got together recently and agreed to set up profiles, so now I’m Facebooked in with all the work peeps. So, just a friendly reminder that you never know who’s checking your stuff (probably me, because Facebook is great), and then sometimes you do know, and that person’s kind of a big deal.

  “What?! The Internet is public?! Who knew?”

Peace, I’m out.

Class Divide Online? | June 27th, 2007

Drop Internet knowledge, you say.

Alright.

I just read this interesting article (thanks, Jeremiah) from the BBC about how the Facebook – MySpace divide among teenagers also mirrors American class divisions. There’s certainly something to this. Not to prove a point from my earlier Jason Taylor post, but when I search high-school classmates on Facebook, I only get 11 results; on MySpace, I get 121. I tried this same thing searching for my college classmates to get the upper-crust perspective (let’s face facts about the majority of peeps who attend Northwestern), but Facebook won’t return more than 500 search results.

You can take the analogy even further than that: the craziness and totally unfiltered atmosphere of MySpace and the guideline-driven, orderly approach of Facebook in some ways mirrors the way our capitalist society works: the people at the top are a smaller group who tend to be more comfortable working the system and staying within a certain set of rules while building a secluded and idyllic existence, leaving everyone else who can’t or doesn’t want to join in to fend for themselves in a Hobbesian-type wizorld. Most people are on the outside looking in, kind of similar to how MySpace has a far larger customer base than Facebook.

But while you can make the outside-looking-in argument against Facebook, it’s equally easy for Facebook to make the basic marketing appeal of “come join our pleasant world, away from the noise” against MySpace: the social-networking world of MySpace outside the refined, neat, well-laid-out confines of Facebook is cacophonous, confusing, vulgar and, mostly, really damned stupid. (Also browser-crashing. Can’t leave out browser-crashing.) In a mirror of conservative critique of modern culture, if principled web design stands in for societal culture, then MySpace is setting the culture back faster and faster every day. When you want a break from the clatter, sometimes you just have to clutter together with like-minded people. Enter Facebook: the U Street of the Internet. For those of you who don’t live in DC, that’s a fast-growing neighborhood with lots of cultural history and cool places to chill, but suffering a potential influx of gentrifiers who can partially appreciate the appeal of the place but will kill that appeal by their growing presence. Kind of like Facebook opening up to high schoolers.

Finally, there’s the way both sites are run. Like the upper reaches of society, Facebook isn’t afraid to crib coolness when it sprouts up from the ranks of the masses, so long as that coolness can fit into its defined limits. (Think new Facebook apps.) And the guys with the power over the MySpace masses know that they probably should do better with restricting the negative consequences of the free-for-all, like porn-site friend-invite spam and the massive amounts of junk, but too many people are clamoring for the freedom to put junk onto their pages that restriction would just invite massive rebellion. (Think the drug war or Prohibition.)

I’m a Facebook man myself, though I also have the neglected MySpace account when I want a nod toward populism. But I gotta admit, that clean layout and crap-free functionality—even if it’s just the manufactured invention of some web designer—is just so freakin’ appealing. I guess that makes me a social-networking latté liberal? Either way, coffee tastes like dirt. And I mean that with no connection to my analogy at all, because coffee really does taste like dirt. It’s disgusting.

Knowledge dropped.

P.S. – Sorry, Friendster.