The Ringtail

I travel on the train a couple of times a week, and I always work on my laptop on the journey. I don’t like sitting around doing nothing at the best of times, and a couple of hours on the train is a big chunk of coding work/hacking that I can get done. I use a Mac these days (separate post), but as an ex-linux user I always look over people’s shoulders to see what OS they use and what they are doing.

There is a very poorly researched and statistically invalid pattern that I’ve noticed on what these different users _do_ on their laptops:

Mac users – tend to be doing something creative or consuming entertainment: making something or watching movies. More watchers than creaters, but quite a bit of garageband tweaking.

Windows users tend to be consuming work: reading email, looking at presentations, looking at spreadsheets.

Linux users (of which I have seen 2) use emacs. Not a large study group but that’s what both of them were doing.

Conclusions? Well, I’d guess that the real answer is that Mac users are using their own machines and therefore working on personal projects (or able to watch movies), and Windows users are using a work machine and are therefore consuming more work. And maybe the Mac users are just killing time until they can get back to email, secretly envying the Windows users who can get a 3G dongle to work…

I got my log-in for Diaspora today. I registered with them a while ago as I liked the idea of what they are aiming to do, and I was pleased that they have carried on and look to have made a great job of it. Trouble is, I already find that I can’t keep up with all of this stuff, so I now need to make a decision on which to keep.

The candidates are:

• identi.ca: great community, interesting people, lively debate – a keeper
• twitter: lots of people I know in the real world, but not much community and can’t see it growing for me
• Google+: nice features, but it doesn’t feel right to me. Quite a crowd of folks I already know from other services, but I don’t see much traffic that interests me
• Facebook: Old school friends that don’t use any other services, but abhorrent privacy polisy that will only ever get worse
• Flickr: can’t remember last time I logged in

OK, so there’s only 5 here, but that’s a lot of time to check all, and because I think cross-posting is shameful and rude, I am trying to juggle different aspects of online sharing on each. Net result is that I don’t really share as much as I might because it’s too much of a drag.

I think I’m going to stick with identi.ca for shorter posts and ‘chat’ and will hope that Diaspora catches on with enough people for it to be valuable to me. Two key things stick out from thinking about this stuff:

• federation is key – if you can run a service (such as statusnet or Diaspora) yourself while still connecting with others, you have the best of all worlds. Everyone can be part of the community that means something to them, but still participate in the wider ecosystem. I hope these services catch on and usurp the ‘one site to rule them all’ mentality of the others.
• aspects (in Diaspora, ‘circles’ in Google+) are a useful idea, but I miss the view onto a users whole profile. On identi.ca you see everything that everyone posts (apart from DMs) and I think this is great. On Google+ I am connected to a whole host of folks, but can’t help feel that it’s all a little redundant if I’m not in any of their circles.

Exciting times, and I am really keen to see where all these services lead. It’s great that people are trying to do something genuinely different rather than trying to just be ‘the new Facebook’, and I hope that true collaboration and sharing can win over advertising, greed and ‘monetization’. Excuse me, I have to go and wash my fingers after typing that word.

I know the world and his dog have been writing about Google+ in the last few weeks, so forgive me for adding to the pot. I can see a lot of pluses and minuses, and my jury is honestly out on whether I will ever really be a ‘user’ of Google+, but one thing becomes abundantly clear: there are now way too many of these types of services.

Don’t get me wrong, choice can be a great thing, but the problem with social services is that everyone has to use the same one for it to be truly valuable – Google+, Facebook or Twitter would be utterly pointless without any connections to share with. In this world, choice is bad because the best service will be the one that most of your friends are on. You may think Zuckerberg is evil, or that Twitter is too full of celebs, but while you have friends that you value online interaction with on those services, you can’t leave.

There have been attempts to get round this. TweetDeck (and some others) allows you to write one message and send it to many services at once, and will also aggregate messages from your friends on other services in one window. Sign up to them all and then let the client software do the work to keep you in touch with everyone. But this is only a hack; as anyone who follows more than a handful of people one all services will know, there’s nothing worse than getting multiple copies of someone’s messages as they are now telling all their social networks what they had for breakfast in one go. There is a special place reserved in hell for those who are actually copying and pasting messages to all services – really, you are not that important.

The problem is not really with any one service – despite what Facebook’s detractors may have you believe – it’s that none of them allow you to venture outside their closed garden and engage with others.

Google+ is making steps in the right direction. Circles are a great way to manage lots of people and only send messages to those you want to see them. Leaving aside the fact that the service still relies on everyone moving in before its truly useful there are other issues to be resolved – what if you send a message slagging off your boss to only a close group of friends, but one of them shares that with a circle that includes your boss? Caveat Emptor in spades.

StatusNet is looking even more promising in that it provides a framework for people to create networks for small groups of people, but then allows you to cross-subscribe. If I use identi.ca and someone else uses another service we can still subscribe to each other. It does rely on everyone using the same underlying framework, but then so do the web, email, SMS, et al. If all the social networks could decide on a standardised message and subscription format then everyone would be free to use the service they prefer, but also to communicate and share with users in other services. We do it with email and texting – everyone has a unique identifier (email address or mobile number) and anyone who knows it can send them a message. While social networking services merely aim to ring-fence and divide users we can safely assume that the battle is for eyeballs to monetize rather than a genuine desire to allow people to socialise. And that’s a shame.

I’ve been brushing up on my Mac OS programming skills this week, with the intention to launch an app or two on the world to see how they go.

I was in Scarborough for work on Monday so I travelled up on Sunday afternoon and stayed over. I had mentally set aside a few hours on Sunday evening to work on a sample app, thinking I could use the internet as a reference. Unfortunately there was no wireless access in the hotel, so I was hobbled by only having the core documentation to help me. Turns out this was the best thing I could have done. Without being able to ‘cheat’ and look up how to do things, I had to work harder myself to understand how the core elements fit together. The net result was that, at the end of four hours, I had an app that worked, but more importantly, I knew how it worked.

Someone recently asked me the best way to learn programming on the Mac. My answer was:

• have a clear idea of an app that you want to use (start small)
• map out the elements you need to build that app
• read the core docs to understand how the objects need to work together
• build it
• extend it by following the same process

I now realise that this was advice I had never actually taken myself. If there had been wireless internet access in that hotel on Sunday, I probably still wouldn’t. Not listening to wise advice from others is bad enough, but not listening to wise advice from yourself? Crazy!

I’ve just had two weeks off work and used the opportunity to keep off of Twitter, identi.ca, facebook and all. Coming back to it all I’ve realised a few things:

• Work is tough and the commute too long, meaning lots of stress and lots of time in the week when I fill time rather than use it. My contract is up at the end of the year and I’d like to move into something more fulfilling and nearer home this time.
• Twitter is a time-suck. I know I’ve said here before that it’s useful for work and all, but I haven’t missed it at all in the last two week’s and I can’t think of a positive reason to get back into it again. I think I’ll keep identi.ca live as I like their approach, but Twitter and Facebook are going.
• I spend a lot of time thinking about coding, but I don’t spend much time actually building my knowledge. I’ve worked through the same problems in many languages, but I don’t think I’ve ever reached the stage where I was coding for a purpose rather than for the sake of it.
• Similar thoughts for fishing and photography – both are distractions that I don’t think I have any long term goals in. Sure there’s room for doing things just for fun, and not everything I do needs to be moving me forward as part of some master plan, but I do have things I want to accomplish that I’m not wholly focussed on while I have so many irons in the hobby fire.

I’m thinking a complete break from geekery for a few months would be nice. It’s a good time of year for birding so I’ll be grabbing my bins and heading out into the MK wilderness in my spare time for a little while. I’d like to write more so I’ll use the blog as a way of getting back into that, but keep my use of the computer to a minimum for a bit.