If you thought every possible aspect of "social networking" had been exhausted on the Web, think again.
This week I met with Rocky Mirza, the CEO of a startup called Dbuz. Mirza is the person behind several other online ventures, including virtual worlds site Weblo.com. His new site, which launched on March 28, is a free, anonymous gossip site. The idea is that you can write anythng positive or negative about someone you know and post it on the site--anonymously (in other words, without fear of reprisal).
To post a comment, you need to know the person's e-mail address, and when comments are entered, the person is notified via e-mail. Should the remarks prove to be, well, less than positive, the subject of said remarks can make the comment private so that no one else can see it. Dbuz assumes that most comments will come from people who actually know the person in question (that's why you can't simply search the site for someone without knowing their e-mail address), and surprisingly, Mirza says that most comments turn out to be positive.
I asked Mirza a lot about the potential for abuse, but in several months of testing, he feels the company has covered most of the possibly nasty scenarios. For example, if all you try to do is flame someone, the site will stop accepting posts from you. Furthermore, if you choose to be, well, less articulate than you should be, the site will reject your post. Call it the modern day equivalent of George Carlin's 7 dirty words you can't say on the radio.
Dbuz could prove to be very viral, considering that you can upload your entire address book, for example, to the site. Then people are notified they've been added to Dbuz--and who isn't going to race there to see what people are saying about them. There's also a business angle: companies can claim their profiles (for a fee) and then customers and clients can see what people are saying about the company. Of course, you could also end up going there only to discover that no one's saying anything about you at all.
But these days, maybe that's a good thing.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
In what may turn out to be one of the seminal decisions in the technological battle for TV 2.O, Hollywood movie companies won a decision against Cablevision in what has been called the network DVR case.
The issue involves Cablevision's announcement a while back that it might (just might, mind you) offer customers a service whereby we would select movies and programs to record just as we do now with our DVRs (digital video recorders). But instead of keeping the shows stored on individual set top boxes (which are expensive and can breakdown and hiccup), Cablevision planned to store our selections on hard drives at the cable company's own offices. The Hollywood execs screamed bloody murder (okay, not "bloody murder," but the Californian equivalent expletive), and immediately called in the lawyers.
So what's the difference, you may well ask, between my DVR and Cablevision's really big DVR? Answer: transmission. The length of the cable is what matters, after all. Short cable from your box to the TV, no problem. Long cable from the company to your box, big problem.
But honestly, the real reason the movie and network people threw a fit is that they want to offer us exactly the same service--and charge us through the nose for it. They just haven't been able to figure out how to do it yet. The cable companies would help, but they've already got DVRs out there for which we pay them every month. Movie companies could do it through the Internet, but the Internet is too slow, and the movie execs too nervous about piracy to make it happen.
And if you think Apple TV will solve the problem, think again, not different.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
To the growing number of reasons to put off upgrading to Vista--or even buying a new machine with Vista loaded on it--you can now add Adobe problems. Current versions of the company's popular Dreamweaver web design software and Photoshop CS2 program have known compatibility problems with Microsoft's latest operating system. And it appears Adobe has no intention of fixing the bugs.
According to a statement on the Adobe Web site, if you want to get those problems--which include Dreamweaver system hangs--fixed, you'll have to cough up more money for an upgrade from Adobe. Given that we've all known Vista was coming down the pipe for several years, Adobe's refusal to fix the problems should be an affront to customers (not to mention a poor reflection on Adobe's competency),
If Adobe wants to squabble with Microsoft (can you think of anyone who doesn't?), that's fine. But making us pay for it is simply inexcusable. Oh, and in case you were wondering, when it serves Adobe's own purpose, the company is pleased as punch to offer a free upgrade. Witness the fact that Adobe will upgrade Acrobat reader to fix problems with Vista--no charge.
Gee, thanks.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
Google, whose corporate creed includes the motto "You can make money without doing evil," has announced that it will retain personal data on individual Web surfers' searches for only 2 years. And in an another amazing example of TP (technological prevaricaton--see article below), some reporters actually bought the marketing spin that this would somehow help protect people's privacy.
Quick background: When you use Google to search for, say, "Clinton," "Clap Your Hands," or "Britney naked" (not that anyone I know would do that), the search engine pegs your search to your IP address--and then stores a record of it. Thus, if someone in the future wanted to know what subversive activities JQ had been up to, they wouldn't have to hack into my computers. All they would need to do is look through the Google records. Indeed, they could in theory go further, since Google not only tracks all of your searches, it also looks at cookies on your system, cookies which may tell them what you ordered online, what bank you use, your daughter's name,...well, you get the idea.
Does Google warn you with a pop-up box every time you enter a search term that you are being tracked. No. Does the company tell you that every search you conduct on its site could be used against you in a court of law? No. Does the company say, "This search could be used against you in your upcoming messy divorce/fraud/terrorist legal battle." Uh, no.
Is Google's retention of such information a standard practice in the industry? No. Try Microsoft or AOL searches and you'll find they toss out the data almost immediately.There are also several search engines that explicitly don't track your searches, including one called Scroogle that submits your query anonymously to (you guessed it) Google.
The only reason Google tracks and stores all this personal data is for money. Spying on you is just incidental to the process. However, if Google really cared about people, as it professes, then it would give each of us a cut of the profit it makes from harvesting our personal information--and quit trying to trick us about how it's protecting people's privacy.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
A few days ago, Symantec held a soirée for the press at Rockefeller Center’s Top of the Rock. The crystal clear, wrap-around view of Manhattan was ostensibly intended to highlight the release of the company’s Norton 360 security program. The views were spectacular, Matt Costa’s performance able, and the demos concise.
After testing Norton 360 for a few days, I’ve found it lives up to the Norton legacy of solid, the-best-offense-is-a-good-defense products. The $70 program includes anti-virus and firewall protection, as well as intrusion detection, anti-spyware protection, and anti-phishing features. It also is simpler to use, allowing many standard programs to run without having to make multiple amendments to the firewall rules. And Symantec allows owners to use the program on up to 3 different machines, an especially welcome feature in my household (hey, can I use it on 8 machines?).
Two additional items of note about Norton 360: First, Symantec is including 2 GB of online storage space free of charge for owners. I highly recommend taking them up on this offer and storing essential files (like Quicken backup files) online for disaster recovery purposes. (If you want more space, you can pay for it.) Second, some of the program’s gimcracks can weigh heavily on older PCs. The site authentication feature, for example, had a detrimental impact on one of my older computers, slowing my surfing to a crawl (after much searching, I figured out how to turn it off). So I only recommend upgrading to 360 if your computer was purchased within the last couple of years.
However, even if you don’t opt for a full-blown security program like Norton 360, make sure you use some kind of firewall. And remember the three most important words in computing: backup, backup, backup.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
Another swipe was taken at Wikipedia this week when it was revealed that one of the main volunteer editors of the free online encyclopedia was a fraud. Specifically, one Ryan Jordan from Kentucky worked under the pseudonym Essjay on the site, lying about his identity and academic credentials (he has none), editing articles he wasn’t qualified to edit, and adjudicating issues of which he had no knowledge.
Much of Jordan’s fraudulent work has been excised from Wikipedia now, but he did edit many pages on Catholicism and religion. Careful readers of those pages would have detected several errors and hints that should have tipped off people to his lack of knowledge and competence. However, the massive undertaking that is Wikipedia makes it virtually impossible to catch every gaff and error and even more difficult to suss out such determined fraud.
Ironically, I tried to correct several mistakes in related pages (namely those concerning the so-called argument from intelligent design, which fails to point out that proponents commit a basic logical fallacy). I actually pointed this out to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in an interview I did with him a while back, which you can read at J-Q.com. In the interview, Wales admits that pranks and fraud do occur on Wikipedia, but that in general it eventually gets corrected. (Following the Jordan scandal, Wales has proposed tightening up some of Wikipedia’s checks and balances.)
Talking to Wales, I found he was an affable guy with a persistently positive attitude. I still believe his project’s goals and mission are to be commended. The Wikipedia has come a long way, and remains a valuable resource for many people. Moreover, such fraud is not unique to volunteer projects like Wikipedia. For example, Jordan tricked The New Yorker magazine as well, where the miscreant was falsely described as a “tenured professor of religion at a private university.”
My personal opinion? Journalists like myself have to deal with such deception every day. Experience and hard work checking sources uncovers most of it; I prefer actually testing products and technologies before writing about them, as well. However, you simply can’t prevent every person that is determined to deceive from committing fraud. In this case, I hope that the fraud will preclude Jordan from ever holding a real academic position. Of course, I also realize that there is little to prevent him from assuming yet another false identity and fooling people again.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
Neologisms are a dime a dozen in our world of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms), but a new one keeps springing to my mind: Technological Prevarication or TP. TP denotes any false or misleading excuse, claim, or cause attributed to some less well understood technological source. Two recent examples are the Chase ATM ad campaign and the termination of the World Trade Center webcam.
In the first case, a Chase TV ad claims the company's ATMs are speedier than ever. The hook is an acquisitive teen jumping from a car at a stop light, punching in his codes into a Chase ATM, and then bounding back into said vehicle--cash in hand--before the light changes. Now traffic lights in New York City are long, but not that long. Indeed, anyone who has used a new Chase ATM within the confines of Manhattan knows that they rank as the slowest in the city--and certainly slower than the old Chase ATM system. The ad announcer, of course, spouts a TP to the contrary. Maybe they should hand the IT chores over to another party....
The second case of TP I noticed this week was when the Lower Manhattan Development site plugged the plug on its webcam overlooking construction of the Freedom Tower downtown. According to reports, the company's purported reason for taking the webcam down was that traffic at the web site was so low that it didn't justify the cost of the webcam. This is TP in the extreme because it costs the company next to nothing to operate a web cam (witness the countless cat and hamster webcams online) and indeed the opposite is true: The more traffic, the higher the bandwidth, the higher the cost.
So why the TP? There are two good candidates: a) the company doesn't want us to see just how little progress is actually being made at the site (not too surprising), or b) it finally occurred to someone that broadcasting the innermost construction details of the Freedom Tower, the site of one of the worst terrorist attrocities ever, probably, maybe, possibly wasn't such a good idea.
It's cases like this that remind one that "the server must be down" excuse is today's equivalent of "the dog ate my homework." Unless, of course, it's MY excuse for not getting a story in on deadline.
The truth about cell phones is that they stink. Clipped voices, endless echoes, dropped calls, bad connections--we endure it all for the convenience of being mobile. Even worse, mobile handsets often don't work at home or in your office unless you stand by the front window.
Fortunately, there are some solutions to poor cell coverage. See my article in the Thursday, March 1, edition of The New York Times. Go to the Technology section to find "Coaxing More Bars Out of That Cellphone" by John R. Quain.
FOR MORE OF JQ'S NEWS AND REVIEWS, VISIT J-Q.COM
