XP and the User’s Loss of Nerve

By | November 22, 2011
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Poor old Microsoft. They’ve had to extend the life of XP by offering it as an option to customers buying new hardware for another six months at least. They realise that people aren’t going to buy a Vista machine unless XP—what’s wonderfully called “downgrade media”–comes with it:

“As more customers make the move to Windows Vista, we want to make sure that they are making that transition with confidence and that it is as smooth as possible,” Microsoft said. “Providing downgrade media for a few more months is part of that commitment, as is the Windows Vista Small Business Assurance program, which provides one-on-one, customized support for our small-business customers.”

There’s a deeper issue here: Microsoft is beginning to recognise that no longer is there any appetite for users to upgrade operating systems themselves. Remember those lines around the block for Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and XP? Well, OK, maybe not all of them, but according to Wikipedia the fanfare surrounding the release of Windows 95 would nowadays be reserved for the ending of a major war. Or the launch of an iPhone, I guess.

Now we’re only interested in software upgrades if it’s a hardware upgrade. If then.

To be fair, I suspect this isn’t just the fault of Vista. I think a few other things have changed:

  • we’re less excited by software these days. Hardware we can get excited about, but as the proportion of people using technology has grown, the appetite for tweaking that technology has shrunk. Apple understand this, which is why they merge hardware and software, something Microsoft’s Balmer still doesn’t get.
  • Part of this is that I don’t think we believe our computers will do the things we think they will anymore. We drank the kool aid back then. We really thought the next iteration of an operating system would seriously improve our day. And, for the most part, it didn’t. So we moved on.
  • We’ve learned that our computers are getting too complex, and we trust them less. If it works, we’re happy. We don’t want to tempt fate by changing it. This feeds into security issues: We don’t feel safe online and so if we have any configuration that hasn’t arisen in calls from our bank or weird things popping up on our screen, we don’t want to experiment.

This feeds back to my running theme of recent weeks: The computer is becoming more and more like an appliance. We need it to to work, preferably out of the box. Apple (and the likes of Nokia, up to a point) have shown that to be possible, and so now we increasingly expect it of all our computing devices.

For the record I don’t necessarily think this is a good thing, because a dulled appetite for experimentation and change is never good, but after the ups and downs of the past few years, and the apparent failure of Vista, I can understand it.

In short, we users have lost our nerve.

Windows XP gets another lifeline : News : Software – ZDNet Asia

Photo credit: Bink.nu

Watching TV With The Community

By | November 22, 2011
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Been watching the veep debates on Livestation, which has an interesting feature: a live chat connected to the program with some LiveStation folks guiding the discussion.

It works pretty well: It’s great to be able to watch TV with a bunch of other people, though I had one eye on that chat, and one eye on some Skype, Google Talk, twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed chat windows too.

This makes all sorts of sense, and I commend Livestation for doing this kind of thing. The IRC format is a bit old school; it would be nice to see something beyond the noisy chat format. Or, even better, being able to drag our other communities into the window to watch together.

But that’s down the road. This is a good way to share information—live and visual—and I think this is an exciting way forward.

Update: Livestation points out that the chat is directly connected to Al Jazeera via Russell Merryman, Head of New Media, who was feeding comments through to the studio to guide the post-debate discussion.

The Toolbar Community

By | November 22, 2011
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I’m really intrigued by the return of the toolbar. Only now it’s not a toolbar. It’s more of a ribbon that appears in your browser on certain sites. Facebook started it but have oddly put it at the bottom of the screen:

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Facebook Connect, which I was so rude about yesterday, extends this idea.

NYT has just launched its own TimesPeople (above) which allows you to see what friends who are also registered with the service are recommending.

The whole idea, of course, is to keep eyeballs on the site in question by building a community around it. If I get suggestions from people I like/trust then I’m more likely to read them than if the NYT recommends them.

Facebook Connect takes this a stage further. Instead of the community being within the site itself, it’s an external community—on Facebook—that moves with the user. In essence it leverages the Facebook community you already have so third party sites can profit from that: If I like something on a Facebook Connect site, then my Facebook buddies will all trot along and read it.

All this is a good idea if you are a website. Media sites like NYT are fighting the mobility of information—the fact that it’s just as likely I’ll read a NYT piece off their website as on it. (Either through an RSS reader, or because someone has cross-posted it or part of it.) What all websites want to do is to keep their readers within the site, and building a community is a good way to do that.

The toolbar is a useful way to do this, since the technology now is available to do this pretty well (TimesPeople’s bugginess aside) without the user having to install anything. If you don’t want the toolbar you can get rid of it easily.

Facebook’s own toolbar is also pretty unobtrusive. Facebook Connect is more intrusive, at least in its introduction, but has received mostly positive reviews. Once signed in you’ll be able to see your friends who are on the same site, and their friends, and hook up with other Facebook users who are on the site. Privacy is an issue here: Do you want your boss to see you pop up on a celebrity site in the middle of the workday?

That aside, a pattern for the future emerges pretty clearly: media companies believe they’ve found a way to differentiate themselves from smaller outfits—blogs, basically—and to build on their volume of content by encouraging communities within their walled gardens. NYT may be big enough to do this: If I visit the NYT site to read a story, I would consider it a useful service to see a list of stories recommended by my NYT buddies.

But it’s still a pain to have to build yet another community around you for each site that offers the service. This is where Facebook Connect comes in. Don’t build a new community; just bring your Facebook community with you.

Community companies lke Facebook are happy to help them build that because they are not creating content themselves, and they have found there’s not enough within their sites to monetise sufficiently. So they have something media companies want to buy—readymade communities of shared interest who can act as recommendation engines to make their websites more sticky.

Facebook etc are so much more powerful and monetisable, in short, if they’re not wedded to the website. That for now means other websites, but of course down the road it could mean physical space too. Think Facebook on your location-aware iPhone able to find books in a shop recommended by your friends, perhaps?

Whether my Facebook community is quite as transferable as it may seem is the question. I have a lot of good friends on Facebook, but I’m not sure our interests overlap that much. In fact, I’d say I’ve got several overlapping online communities of friends and acquaintances, some better suited to others for this kind of thing. My twitter community is little different to my plurk community, to my LinkedIn community and my Facebook community.

Still, TimesPeople is an interesting start.

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Facebook Connect – To What?

By | November 22, 2011
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I’m trying to work out why this irritates me so much: Visit The Insider and you’ll be continually pestered by a popup (for some reason not caught by the pop-up blocker in Firefox) inviting me to install The Insider’s Facebook application.

This is the much-touted Facebook Connect – a successor to the disastrous Beacon thing, that upset users because it drew their activity on other sites and published it to their Facebook feed. Facebook Connect enables you to use your Facebook log-in to access other sites, and to bring your Facebook friends with you as you visit those sites—in other words, insteading of building separate communities for each site you frequent, you have one: Facebook.

I’m not going into the pluses and minuses of this right now. What concerns me is how it touts itself.

First off, there’s no way to stop the pop-up window coming back: Click cancel and it’ll come back a few pages later; hit the x in the top right hand corner and the same thing happens.

Secondly, The Insider knows who I am:

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I have no Facebook windows open in Firefox. So I can only assume that The Insider is reading my Facebook cookies. Is there any other way? So somehow the Facebook Connect third party site is able to connect my login ID to my name and email address, even when no Facebook session is in progress?

It’s irritating, but it’s also a source of some concern. If Facebook Connect proliferates, are we going to get these popups at every site? Why is there no way of blocking this and future intrusions, should I so wish? And why are Facebook Connect partners getting access to my Facebook signon and name without my say-so?

How to Use RSS Feeds

By | October 1, 2008
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If there’s one thing I get more questions about than anything else, it’s “how do I do the whole RSS thing?” So here’s a cut out and keep guide to how do get up to speed on RSS.

First off, a brief introduction (and why you should care.) Feeds are the mainstay of the Web world. They deliver information to you without the clutter of email and can be read from any computer. They used to be just for reading blogs, but nowadays you can access your calendar, to do lists, and more or less anything you want via an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. RSS is useful; it’s just a shame it’s a bit too geeky to be really straightforward.

This is how I do it. Yes, there are quicker and easier ways to set up feeds, and yes, this all sounds a bit unexciting and fiddly. But this approach, in my view, is the best because once it’s set up, you don’t have to do very much. And if you already have a Gmail email account, this makes even more sense.

1. Install Firefox browser if you don’t have it already. Download it from here. (www.getfirefox.com). (Firefox works better at doing this than other browsers; I suggest you use Firefox as your main browser; it also means this guide will work equally well for Mac users.) 

2. In the View menu in Firefox, go to the Toolbars sub-menu and click on the Bookmarks Toolbar if it is not already ticked. This will add a toolbar below the top row of buttons in your browser.

3. Now, using Firefox, go to Google Reader’s homepage (www.google.com/reader/) Open a Google account if you don’t have one by clicking on the link Create an account now. Follow all the steps necessary to have a Google account (you can use this for email too) and to set up your Google Reader.

4. In Google Reader, click on Settings in the top right hand corner, and then Goodies. Scroll down to the section “Subscribe as you surf.” Drag the Subscribe… button in that section to your Bookmarks toolbar (the on you just set up). Do this by moving the cursor over the orange button until the pointer turns into a pointing hand. Click on the link and, without releasing your finger from the mouse button, drag the link to the toolbar at the top of your page. Release the mouse button, and you’ll see a white sheet icon with “Subscribe” next to it. (If it doesn’t work the first time, try again.)

5. You now need to add some feeds to your Reader. Visit a web page with an RSS feed on it. (If you’re stuck for choice, visit my own humble abode at www.loosewireblog.com.) In the address field at the top of the browser, where the web site address is located, you’ll see an orange RSS icon in the right hand corner. This icon, the accepted button for RSS stuff, indicates an RSS feed is available. Click on the “Subscribe” button you just installed in your Firefox toolbar.

6. Your browser will take you to your Google Reader page, and will have loaded the RSS feed from the page you just visited. You’ll see 10 or so items from that feed listed in the Reader.Click on the blue/grey “Subscribe” button in the top right hand corner of the Google Reader.

7. A yellow bar will appear in the top half of the screen. Click on the “Add to folder” pull down menu in that bar and then, at the bottom of that list, click on “New folder”. Add a name for the folder you want to keep this RSS feed in (“news” or “personal” or whatever.) Click OK. The folder will now appear in the left hand pane with the feed you’ve just subscribed to.

8. To read the feed either click on the name of the feed, in blue, on the left hand pane, or the folder icon and title of the folder it belongs to. The latter will include all feeds in that folder, gathered together. The former will just be the feed you’ve subscribed to.

9. To view just the headlines of each feed, click on “List View” in the top hand corner of the Google Reader; to read more extended chunks (and sometimes the whole post) click on “Expanded View” next to it. To read the post on its original web site (rather than in Google Reader) click on the headline to expand the view of the post, and then the larger font headline below. The link will open in a new browser window.)

10. Now you can add feeds to your collection whenever you see the orange icon appear in the address box of a page you visit.

That’s it. Let me know how you got on, whether you have more questions, tips or requests for more guides. Good luck.