The Value of Twitter

I wasn't sure how Twitter could really be useful to me. Most people I know use Facebook exclusively and I don't have anywhere that I could advertise my handle to jack up the follower counts. On top of that I don't have a particular area that I focus in - so I don't appeal to niche categories of people. So, what use is it other than a dumbed down RSS feed? It took me a long while to figure it out, but the answer is interaction.

Almost everything I do there is based on replying or talking to someone rather than just saying something because I thought of it. I don't have enough followers to just go Tweeting things and feel like I'm not shouting in to a black hole.

I have found it useful in reaching out to specific people or companies. App developers for mobile devices are incredibly helpful on Twitter. If I've had questions or praise for them their dedicated accounts have always been good about getting back to me. That is some direct contact that I wouldn't have necessarily had before.  

@GoodOLMC Not likely I'm afraid. An Android version just isn't financially viable.
— Twitterrific (@Twitterrific) October 6, 2013

It's really very humanizing in a way that I wouldn't get from a blog post or an "About" section on a website. I'm no different than a lot of people in that I like spreading the word about products I love and getting a pat on the head for it is always a nice reward.

@GoodOLMC Thank you for the kind support and evangelism. :)
— Flexibits (@flexibits) October 17, 2013

Thanks buddy! When enough of you remember to do this, it makes a difference! @GoodOLMC
— Dan Carlin (@HardcoreHistory) August 29, 2013

Being able to have incredibly direct communication with app developers is just one example of the humanizing nature of Twitter though. Take for example when I accidentally started a conversation between two geeks (I say that lovingly) I follow on Twitter and on their respective sites: Phil Nickinson from AndroidCentral.com and Eric Geller from TheForce.net. I listen to their podcasts weekly and follow AC regularly so to get a reply from either of them was pretty cool in the sense that, while they're just people, our communication had only ever been one way up to that point. I tagged Phil in a Tweeted response to Eric about the Moto X and, hey, they had a small conversation. There's really some power there.

@ericgeller @GoodOLMC Because it's only August. Just wait.
— Phil Nickinson (@philnickinson) August 20, 2013

But being able to converse with people who I DIDN'T pay for a service from feels even better.

I don't have a lot of followers and relatively speaking I have few Tweets - but Twitter has proven valuable in some small ways. For fans and creators alike it adds a new dimension to communication - especially if used well.

iPad Air vs Kindle Paperwhite: Let's Talk Reading

I'm over paper. At one time I thought I'd miss the texture, the smell, and the sensation enough to never be able to live with an e-reader or digital books. I was wrong - I only miss paper a little bit. I miss the smell and the feel but not nearly as much as I love the convenience of digital books. It is still the content of a book that is key and with an e-reader that content is everywhere I am.

So, what's the best way to replace it? I'm putting up two categories:

Representing the high-res tablet market is the iPad Air. Light. Thin. Retina. App Store. Magical. Apple. A lot of people in the world don't say "tablet," they say "iPad." Marketing? Hell yes. Undeserved? Hell no. Reviews for the Air are in and it is everything you could love about the iPad line with a better design.

iPad Air Reviews | iMore

And not only will that Retina screen produce some gorgeous text - it will give you the ability to manipulate content. You can zoom in for the details on that comic book or school text. Get in to the nitty gritty on that bar graph. Your world is immersive.

Immersion comes with costs though. Looking at a big, back-lit screen can be a little rough on the eyes even with brightness turned down. Oh, and don't forget to charge that battery. By the way, how's your attention span? Can you handle notifications going off as you read your book or latest edition of The Magazine? Don't. Swipe. Down.

For the dedicated e-reader category the only device left standing is the Kindle - specifically the Kindle Paperwhite. High res e-ink display that you can read anywhere. Side illumination. Battery for months. A build quality that can faintly remind you of holding a physical book. It is no longer an e-reader market: it is a Kindle market.

Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Review (2013) | The Verge

The Paperwhite is for a single purpose: reading. This is not a jack-of-all trades device. If you pull it out you want to sit down and enjoy a good story with no distraction or interruption. You want to take it to the park and not be bothered, lay in bed and forget about the government, politics, fanboy battles, and your job. Nothing can touch you if you focus on what you're reading on a screen that holds 1,000 books but is as clear as a printed page.

But, oh? You don't have room for another device in the bag. You need to streamline things. Reading is secondary and you'd really like to have some Twitter popping up so you can switch from one task to another. Maybe you actually like your job and want to see some email in your downtime. Sorry - Kindle won't get that job done. Multitaskers be warned: this is not your singular device.

Comparing iOS and Android

Someone asked me to give some insight in to switching to iOS from Android on a forum I participate in. These were my thoughts.

I've done stints with both iOS and Android and genuinely like both of them in different ways. I do always end up back on my iPhone though. Rather than tell you what's great about being on the iPhone I'll tell you what I miss about Android. If these things matter to you it could be more of a pain to switch than it is worth.

1. No file manager/everything in a silo
I'm still annoyed that if I want to email a document I can't do that easily without going to the app the document lives in and emailing it from there. With Android it is far easier to get files you need in the apps you want when you want them. On the flip side it is pretty annoying to have to go through a dozen or more different items on a phone or tablet just to get where you want to be.

2. Apps are powerful, but not free (and I don't mean $)
The app situation on iOS is better than Android. Rene Richie summed it up well in this article: The difference between iOS and Android developers and why it's not just a numbers game | iMore. The quality and inventiveness of the iOS app developer is currently better. That can always change but for now it's an iOS advantage. BUT, your apps will not roam free on your device. Because everything is kept in it's own sandbox the ability of apps to take root and become pervasive (think Google Now) is basically non-existent. Even something like auto-upload from Dropbox won't work well because it isn't allowed to keep going after a certain time. This could very well be changing in iOS 7 with it's new multitasking rules, but we'll need to see what happens.

3. Notifications
Android notifications - sweet, sweet Android notifications. You know what really kills me? Having a notification take up part of my screen when I'm watching a video or playing a game. Android just got this RIGHT. Not only is how the notification is presented better, but so is the management of multiple alerts. Android's notification center is incredibly powerful and is a wonderful task management system in and of itself. Yes, it can get overwhelming at times, but it is just so easy to get rid of individual items. You can pop over to the iOS 7 forums and see Apple's new take on the pull down and notifications in general, but it is just a slight improvement. (Warning: Android feels better in this regard, but sometimes iOS actually feels more efficient for me because I'm so annoyed by the system that it compels me to answer alerts quicker. Take that for what you will.)

Now, with all of that said, I still prefer iOS. This is just a different way of looking at it.

American Gods

American Gods by Neil Gaiman on Amazon

I have to read this book again. But I may have to wait until I read a book about ancient mythology - I think I would have gotten more out of it. The references to gods from multiple cultures were hit or miss for me just because I didn't recognize some of them. I'll revisit at some point with more experience.

The human characters were pretty compelling and the author did a really good job of moving my knowledge along with the main character's experience. Sometimes a main character is required to have skills the reader can't hope to duplicate but in this case I felt like I was going step by step with him and we were both learning as we went.

The idea of gods being made by our beliefs and how those gods grow, change, and whither as time progresses was something I really enjoyed. Us making our own gods out of our "worship" and sacrifice, but not necessarily as we would think about the Ancient Greeks worshiping Zeus, rung especially true as I watched some of the Emmys broadcast the other night. There was a Don Cheadle segment where he reviewed the year 1963 in terms of television history. Martin Luther King Jr's speech, the JFK assassination, and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan were his highlights. The part that made me pause was where he exalted television for bringing this to us and he really did seem...like he was asking us to worship the television industry for everything that it's been a part of. This is especially interesting considering that TV as we know it is changing and in some ways dying.

Android Central has me really in to making the distinction between AOSP Android, Google Android, and OEM Android. I always had a tendency towards this but I've been put over the edge lately.

Rather than say it's "fragmented" I think about it more as just an expression of the open nature of the platform. It is the same thing, really, just a different way of looking at it.

You get a bunch of different takes on what Android could be, how it should look, and what the software can do. At this point it's hard to even complain when something like the One or the S4 don't get the latest version of Google's Android. Samsung has basically made it's own and built a unique feature set on top of it. If you don't like that you shouldn't have purchased a Samsung Android phone to begin with (GP Editions being excepted, of course).

This is now of course even easier because Google Play Services have been decoupled from the big Android updates and the Googley apps are right up in the store.

There are downsides when you have multiple versions of an OS floating around and some popular devices not running the same software - but just as a concept the "fragmentation" bothers me far less than it did two to three years ago.

What is Stock Android? | Android Central

Frozen Android Phones Give Up Data Secrets

A team from Erlangen's Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany has figured out that by freezing a Galaxy Nexus to -10C and quickly connecting and disconnecting the battery the data scrambling system on Android 4.0 can be bypassed. You need a special software that the source article only attributes to this team, but the concept has been proven.

The reason for this is that:

Data fades from memory much more slowly when chips are cold which allowed them to grab the encryption keys and speed up unscrambling the contents of a phone.

The data scrambling system has been effective and created a "nightmare" for law enforcement, so this was done as a way to get around it.

This is something can also be done on PCs and laptops.

Source: BBC

Palm Timeline

webOS Nation did a cool graphic of the life of Palm:

Palm Timeline

Derek, their editor, created a timeline of all of Palm's twists and turns since their founding. I knew that Palm had gone through a lot, but they changed hands/brands nine times. That is absolutely insane to me and it isn't even counting large funding from Elevation Partners or software/personal splits like Handspring.

My first reaction was, "How can a company go through that much and maintain any consistency or succeed?" The answer of course was that they were consistent in their OS to a fault and eventually did not succeed.

Palm is now just some patents and software for HP and software for LG, but I think that the brand and whichever software it used/licensed has almost always been in that state of flux in one way or another.

Chris Ziegler of The Verge did an excellent write up of the company starting just before the webOS era that is well worth a read, too.

Pre To Postmortem

Being Swindled? No Way!

Ever wonder why there is a fuss over the use of data caps by your internet provider? If you don't stop and think about it, or have it explained well, you would think it is the run of the mill screw job. No - as it turns out the truth hurts even more than that. Painful.

Source: Blogphilo
Via: Android Central

Gabe Newell and the Modern Company

Those of you in to gaming have heard of Gabe Newell and his company Valve; the creators of games such as Portal, Half Life, Left For Dead and the online gaming service/store Steam. For those of you not familiar with their work they are an incredibly successful company that prides itself on making great games, building online ecosystems for their customers, engaging their community, and creating new channels for their business. At CES they announced a new set-top box that will be their first hardware step in to the living room.

Gabe is celebrated on the Internet for his forward thinking and openness. On the latest episode of Chris Hardwick's The Nerdist he had Gabe on to talk about Valve's corporate structure and how the company keeps making products and services that people love. He goes over a few different strategies for his company in the internet era that he felt should go on to replace modern corporate/business strategy. Anyone frustrated with the movings of business/corporations/middle management should take some hope from this, hopefully, future business model.


A few choice excerpts:

• Valve has no real marketing/social media department. He believes that every employee is basically a marketer and representative as well as a builder. He doesn't want anyone who has the job of doing just customer relations - it removes the designer/programmer/average employee from what the community/customer wants.
• Instead of a strictly hierarchical structure that Gabe said was, "...based on bad ideas on how to run armies that usually entail people running over hills and getting shot," Valve employs a "straight line" that lets any employee pursue what they have a passion for and go straight to him with ideas that he can give them the go ahead for or not. Middle management is the enemy and where good ideas go to die.
• They discussed the Valve new employee handbook that needs it's own section, but an interesting bit of philosophy was that, "If you're working more than 40 hours a week and getting burnt out than you are doing something wrong."

Source: http://www.nerdist.com/2013/01/nerdist-podcast-gabe-newell-valve-the-company/