Mamma told me there’d be days like these.
In the year that the term
defriend became the lingua franca de annum in a publication as august as the New Oxford English Dictionary, we’re certainly witnessing the dawn of the social networking era and its inevitable hyper-self-absorption as witnessed in this subsequent navel-gazing debate over whether the announcement actually meant to say “unfriend.”
Unfriend/Defriend? Am I unconcerned or deconcerned? Ask me next year.
When I started cleaning my email e-Holiday card list I went first to my own modest social network on
Facebook, then took a dive into
LinkedIn and even
Skype and
Plaxo for hard to find colleagues who’ve changed addresses, jobs or locations. The social networks have proven remarkably agile at this task and I suspect will become moreso as their ubiquity increases. Gone are the days when you had to endure pop-up, spyware crap laden “Look-up applications” in order to update an email ad' or a phone number. The S-Net represents the first, albeit baby step toward each one of us being able to manage our own presence and information profile effectively and for this they are important and good. My first pass was able to garner me a brand new line on a friend I hadn’t seen in 32 years and current emails for 30 job-hoppers who hadn’t remembered to send me “I’ve moved” notices.
Once I nailed that problem down, (about two days over a 1900 entry address list), I tackled a hair-puller that has plagued me for four years. This one involved how Outlook sends graphic files. I created my nice little e-card ...
... but repeated sends revealed that somehow Outlook was mashing it up and sending this
Ugh!!!
My seasonal nightmare four years running. Tried saving in all formats and all resolutions. Always the SOS. I could find nothing in the online literature that suggested why this was so, but a combination of research and trial and error and dumb ### luck finally yielded a way to insert a modestly attractive gif file into the Outlook message envelope and not have it look like hash after it’s sent. For those of you on my e-card list. This is why you got it today, rather than a week ago. For those of you who employ high power graphics programs and remailers or software designed to block such email, you don’t care, so read on. Anybody interested in how I did it can
contact me. I’ll spill all for the benefit of science.
My 15 year old asked today whether it was random chance that Facebook made it so big rather than MySpace or other social sites and I asked him why he thought it was so. He thought for a moment then said perhaps it was “the menu and stuff” which I took to mean “interface” and we had a “teachable moment” about interface design and its importance to personal information management. His is the interface generation. They juggle icons and menus like my generation manipulates words and phrases. We talk about how much catching up they have to do to bring depth and nuance to their conversations but our generation has just as much catching up to bring conversation to our depth and nuance.
Nobody has really monetized social network applications yet, but I have a feeling that the social networks have created the next great wave in personal computing and that we’re just on the lift of the swell of the Web 3.0, the “you web” where you can do everything from
start a revolution to learn what your f&f had for dinner.
The social networks bring another small but not so minor innovation to the desktop, particularly if you use Outlook, like much of corporate
America. Using a plug-in named
Xobni, (“zobni”) it interfaces with your social network and if the api stars align, you get a little thumbnails for your contacts.
Google Wave promises to slam all that together under the ubiquitous Google umbrella as the next big e-thing and while the big G offers users tremendous utility for the show-stopping price of “free” you have to worry about how much of your life you’re willing to entrust to the G cloud, from search history, to documents, to emails to social networks, before they “own” you. This from the company that was so willing to support
the Great Firewall of China. They don’t exactly call to mind the hard-bitten media moguls of the 20
th Century who stood on free speech as if it were inviolable and sent grizzled reporters and publishers to prison singing Cumbayah before they’d allow a government entity to dictate to them. I don't know how good I feel about putting all my eggs in a cloud. Strange days indeed.
2.
Who the ### is Joe Lieberman to take the public option off the table and why the Dems are allowing the Senator from The Insurance State to steal true healthcare reform from us?
These are my hot buttons. You have the right to your own damned buttons but things like these really @!$$ me off and when they’re deliberately under-reported that really @!$$es me off even more. Stories like these are not right at your fingertips. You have to stretch a little. Stretching is good. Testing your calcium against diverse beliefs (as in a couple of above links) is good for the ethical bone structure and results in shining white teeth.
Make 2010 the You Web Year. Make the “You Web” yours and put it/yourself out there for the world to see. You even have the right to go through other people’s stuff (within limits they’ve established.) Most recently, you now have the right to aggregate and interface to satisfy your own peculiarities and curiosities. Poke it, prod it. Ride it for all its worth. It’s never been easier, more fun or more popular.
Just remember the words of Horace, the Roman poet who urged us and all schoolboys to “carpe diem” also warned “Semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum.”
Once released, the word flies (or in this case drops) irrevocably.
To all Friends and Family on more than one continent who care enough to keep coming back to read, mille mille grazia.
To all …
Happy END OF 2009 with BIG HOPES for Happier 2010!
