Tag: facebook

  • The Social

    Facebook went public last week. You might have heard about it. They sold some stock or something.

    In the big lead-up to the big let-down, I wrote a piece for CNN.com about why I’m staying on Facebook and why people should just accept that the kingdom of Zuckerberg is just a fact of life and that people should just get used to it.

    Of course, every time Facebook has shown vulnerability or made a bad decision in the past, they’ve found a way to sidestep criticism and come roaring back. This stock market thing shows a much deeper, perhaps more fundamental weakness in the company that we really haven’t seen before.

    And since was a column that was meant to be a little contrarian in the first place, I find myself wondering if it’s going to be a piece of writing that I’ll come to regret in a few short years. We’ll see, won’t we? I certainly was anticipating the flurry of negative comments this time around and was able to enjoy them from backstage, twirling my mustache and saying to myself, “Job well done, villain.”

    What I wasn’t expecting was for CNN to slap it on the front page center with my name out there for the world to see. That was pretty amazing-cool, but also terrifying at the same time. I felt like I’d been called out by my own words, made to stand before a crowd and justify my opinion. Lucky for me, I have a lot of opinions about Facebook, even if they’re not even always consistent or right.

    Dustin Maxey (right) and his friend Larin Frederick, talk about “GroupWink,” a group dating app Maxey is planning to launch this summer. Photo by Julia Robinson for the Austin American-Statesman

    Another big piece I wrote that ran this week was in the Statesman and it was about ambient/serendipity apps like “Highlight” that pair you up with people nearby, social network-like, even when you’re not actively using them. The piece evolved into an article about the line between convenient and creepy and how future apps are going to have to overcome that label.

    I had some great conversations in the interviews I did for the article and as usual it was just a lot of material that needed to be condensed into one good-sized story. I hope it didn’t lose too much in that process and that it made enough sense to people who don’t follow this kind of tech.

    I’ve had a weird thing lately, just the last few days, where I’m getting a little tired and bored with the whole social media thing. It’s not that I’m not posting; I still do that. But I’ve also found myself not posting a lot when in the past I would have responded to something or had a thought I wanted to share. Some of it may be that I’ve been writing so much about social media lately that I’m a little burned out on thinking about it, but some of it is also that I know that if I respond to certain posts that I’m going to get into a whole conversation with someone and of late, I’ve been so pressed for time that I’d rather just not even get into it, you know?

    A guy I know, Loren Feldman, is working on a documentary about social media and I’m dying to see how it turns out because he and I have a very similar view on a lot of what’s going on, only he’s able to say a lot of the things I can’t in ways that I don’t. We both feel the bubble is close to bursting and that in a few short years, people will have moved on to something else, even if it’s just faster/more efficient ways of doing what we’re doing now.

    Or it could just be that I get bored of hearing my own voice (typed, rather, and online) and that I get the sense a lot of other people are chirping along with very little to say, too, at times. It gets boring sometimes, doesn’t it? That can’t just be me that feels it, right?

    Another theory: summer is here (we get it early in New Braunfels) and I’d rather just be outside, swimming or tubing. That’s probably it, honestly.

    Schlitterbahn is pretty empty today. More water for us!

  • Facebook is a maze with 850 million mice

    I’m always amazed that something as popular as Facebook has so much wrong with it. It works, sure, in ways that Twitter didn’t for a very long time (like just being available most of the time) and that MySpace never did (still and always ugly, forever and ever). But so much stuff is impossible to figure out or changes at a moment’s notice or simply doesn’t work across all platforms.

    Anyway, you get what I’m saying if you’ve ever been a heavy user (or a slightly-more-than-casual one) over in Zuckerbergville. This week’s Digital Savant column was an attempt to answer some of those nagging, weird questions about how to do things that should be a lot more intuitive on a site that serves so many. I didn’t have answers for all the questions that friends were kind enough to contribute, but I did learn a lot while writing it.

    I also did a blog post this week about PC gaming optimization tips (more interesting than it sounds!) based on the habits of those on the pro gaming circuit. It made me pine for the days when I used to crack open PC cases and install my own mother-ba-boards and Riz-NAMs, but not enough to give up my Apple laptop and go back to those endless tinkering hours.

  • Identity 2: Obligatory Boogaloo Reference

    Illustration by Don Tate II, Austin American-Statesman

    A few months ago, I mentioned an online identity series I was working on for the Statesman. The second major story of that series, focused on junior-high-aged kids, ran in Sunday’s newspaper. It was one of those stories where I got panicked in the last week before it was due thinking I didn’t have nearly enough material, so I worked really hard to fill in any holes that I had and in the end ended up with more than I needed (an essential problem to have on large pieces, I find).

    This one didn’t require a huge edit/revision the way the first story did. I tried something different in the writing process, too. For larger project stories I’ve been outlining, something I was always lazy about until we did a training session with Thomas French. He shared with us the outline for his stunning story “A gown for Lindsay Rose” (GO. Read it. Now.) and it restored my faith in outlines. For this latest story, I did a much chunkier outline than usual, pasting in quotes and bits I had in my head as I went through my 50-or-so pages of notes. Usually I just write section heads and try to keep the topics I want to cover in the story under those headers, but this time I actually put fully formed material into the outline. It made writing the story much faster and I spent a lot less time hunting through my notes for quotes or data that I had highlighted during my last read-through of the notes. Sometimes we have to trick our brain a little to keep organized.

    The story also yielded the Don Tate illustration above, which I love. Don has a talent for taking these stories that are only half-formed when we discuss them and he starts and turning them into great artwork. We’re very lucky to have him. He makes our articles look good.

    The other piece I had in the paper this weekend was a Digital Savant column about Facebook’s phone number-grabbing shenanigans. It ran as a blog post last week, too.

    I’ve lost track of what Kirkus Reviews app reviews I’ve linked to, but I’m still doing about one a week. A few recent ones include Tail Toes Eyes Ears Nose (which Lilly loved), F:SH (not so great) and A Bear Ate All The Brussels Sprouts (beautiful, but odd).

    We had a really full and wonderful weekend. Lilly’s godmother Jessica visited, the kids took full naps when they were supposed to, we visited Schlitterbahn and my wife and I even had time to go to the movies to see The Help. (Which, I didn’t realize, could get you in trouble with social media friends who believe the movie is racist. Sorry!) Lilly also invented (at least it was new in our home) the term “bootie-butt.” I may blog about that separately. It was kind of revelatory.

    I’m taking some vacation time in early September and Late October, I think, so I’m figuring out what I’m going to do around that time and if there’s some writing I should be doing. I’ve been sort of avoiding the computer at home, late at night when I normally work on freelance stories and blogging. I’ve felt like I do enough posting and writing all day and by the evening, I’m really tired of hearing (reading) my own voice. I think that’s common for writers and something that it’s best probably not to think about too much. The best cure for that, I think, it just to read a lot of stuff from other writers you admire and I’ve been trying to do that as much as possible when there’s time.

  • Apps, podcasts, (absent) fireworks and the Dora Generation on Facebook

    This short week got full really quick! This morning, a CNN.com tech column I wrote appeared this morning about what would happen if the Dora Generation (kids 5-12) begin to join Facebook en masse.

    It’s a little out-there compared to the stuff I usually write for them, but with a few tweaks, they were willing to publish it as satire. I’m keeping an eye on the comments for this one because this time when people post, “This article is ridiculous and completely dumb!” I’ll be inclined to kind of agree.

    Photo by me for the Digital Savant blog
    I might be doing stuff more pieces like this for CNN.com soon, which makes me very, very happy.

    Today, I also posted Digital Savant Podcast #5, featuring GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham.

    I always love chatting (or Tweeting) with Stacey and she proved to be a great, fun guest. I look for people who know a lot about tech but also don’t take it too deadly seriously and Stacey is a reporter with a great sense of humor. You can download it on the blog or grab it from iTunes.

    Photo I shot for the Austin American-Statesman
    I wrote a “Coffee With…” feature for the American-Statesman about Michael Doise, an Austin app developer who has created several Braille-education apps. Really remarkable guy.

    I got to meet with him and his girlfriend and geek out a bit over the stuff he’s working on.

    Also in the Statesman over the weekend was a reverse-published blog post I did about Turntable.fm, a DJ chat room/music service that my brother and I have gotten completely hooked over the last week. We’re planning on doing a horrible songs room, perhaps on Friday, and just playing the worst stuff we can think of. You should join us! You can find the room here.

    Other cool stuff: I submitted an “I Am Not a Crackpot!” audio piece to my favorite podcast, Extra Hot Great and it appeared in an All-Crackpot episode. Lots and lots of fun and a great listen with lots of great submissions. You should subscribe to the podcast. My piece is about how we keep Closed Captioning on all the time. It comes in at around the 45-minute mark. I may not have convinced the podcasters, but I feel vindicated by the commenters on the site.

    We had a pretty quiet 4th of July weekend. We didn’t travel anywhere and we had some family stay over. We took Lilly and Carolina to an insane place in New Braunfels called The Jumpy Place where they have giant bounce castles, like six of them in one giant warehouse-sized building. There are also comfy sofas and chairs for parents. But did we sit in them? We did not.

    Were we supposed to go in the bouncy castles with the kids and climb the giant slides and jump around even though we are adults? We were not. Did we? Shit yes.

    4th of July night was oddly quiet. No fireworks, no explosions. We’ve had a drought and there’s been a big ban on fireworks that, strangely, people actually observed. For the last few years, we’ve missed the fireworks. We used to go every year, especially when we were at S. Padre Island. We’d crowd as close as we could to Louie’s Back Yard by the water and watch the explosions.

    The kids go to bed so early that for the last three of four years, we’ve just resigned ourselves to missing the displays. I got a guilty bit of pleasure knowing that nobody else was going to get fireworks this year, either, but then I felt bad sitting inside Monday night, waiting for the sound of Black Cats exploding in someone’s backyard nearby. The sound never came.

    Oh, one other quick note — I was supposed to be teaching a class at the University of Texas this fall as an adjunct professor, but it looks like that has fallen through. I was approached about it last year and agreed to do it. Then, it got to be July and I started wondering why nobody had contacted me; shouldn’t I be preparing or something?

    Turns out it never really materialized and I just found out. So maybe that’ll happen in the future, but most certainly not for the fall semester. That’s OK. I’m sure I’ll find ways to stay busy.

  • So reviewed

    I hate rushing reviews for tech stuff.

    This is a bit antithetical to what the industry is like now. Everybody wants their hands on a gadget first and to put out the earliest review (usually right when an embargo lifts) and rack up those page views from curious Googling readers.

    But given the kinds of stuff we’re talking about — tablet PCs, smart phones, stuff that you really have to live with a while to get your head around and really sort usefulness from novelty, I just don’t think you can review something like an iPad or a radically new kind of phone in a few hours or even a day or two. So I tend to play with stuff over time and then realize that a month has gone by and I still haven’t written anything about (insert name of gadget). Right around the time the PR people start e-mailing me, asking, “So, uh… are you ever gonna review this thing and mail the product back?” is when my crack timing, motivation and work ethic kick in and I write the damn thing. Sometimes I write two in the same article just to clear the decks.

    So, here’s some recent stuff that ran in the paper. I did a review that appeared as a Sunday secondary taking a look at the Motorola Xoom tablet and the T-Mobile G-Slate. I liked them both for different reasons, but not as much as the iPad, which should be no surprise to anyone who’s spent some serious time with an iPad or iPad 2. The article in the paper was reverse-published from a Digital Savant blog entry from a little while ago.

    A bit of a companion to that is a first-impressions I did of the BlackBerry PlayBook this week.

    I’ve got a more detailed story about migrating to a tablet running June 11 that’ll offer tips, app ideas and more to those thinking about moving away from a laptop or desktop to something a little more portable.

    Also had a review of the new Mortal Kombat game, which I quite liked. Spent a lot of nights trudging through that story mode (which was ridiculously awful/awesome) and getting back my moves from all those years of Kombo muscle memory.

    And on Saturday, I wrote a lengthy “Raising Austin” column about kids, security and Facebook. I got to talk a little about a trip I took to Dallas last year to speak at a panel for Jewish Family Services on the topic and to tie it in with some recent news. Sometimes I do speaking stuff or freelance and worry that it won’t be useful for anything but making a little money, but other times it pays off in other ways and helps me a lot at my day job.

    That’s about it for now. Summer has kicked off her in New Braunfels and we went to Schlitterbahn three times in one weekend. That is how the Gallagas roll when it is hot outside and we have season passes.

  • Holiderring-do

    It’s Thanksgiving in two days and, like I said last time, things seem to be accelerating grimly, spinning outward as if by centrifuge, instead of settling into tedium and sugarness, like my famous (OK, Luby’s famous) sweet potato casserole.

    I spent the end of last week finishing up what I thought would be a front-page story (in the end: not so much) about a University of Texas study about how students and recent grads are using Facebook. S. Craig Watkins, who led the study, is one of the smartest, most interesting people I get to interview regularly and it’s always fun to catch up on what his thoughts are on the state of social media and tech.

    For several weeks before that, I’d been working on a holiday tech gift guide for the Statesman, an annual tradition that always ends up being more work than I remember from the year before. We focused on Internet-video-on-your-TV products like Apple TV, Roku and the Logitech Revue with Google TV. I’ve tried two of those three products and am curious about the third (Apple TV), especially since iPads and iPhones can now do a neat trick with it.

    There’s also a helicopter that flies around and shoots video. You’re welcome!

    Another annual tradition is a similar gift guide I do for Television Without Pity. It’s more a photo gallery than a story, much shorter and with some different items. If you like things like Karaoke Revolution Glee, you may like this guide.

    This week, I’ve been finishing up a profile of game designer Warren Spector, who is releasing Disney Epic Mickey next week. The reporting for that story has been pretty epic itself; I’ll tell you more about it after the story runs on Sunday.

    What was I talking about again? Oh, right! Sweet potato casserole! I gotta get on that for Thursday.