William F. Garrity

Connell's soccer team is at the US East regional championships in the Middle-of-nowhere, West Virginia. It's interesting to note how all the families are keeping in touch and coordinated--where and when to meet for dinner, for instance--we're not in the same hotel.

All of us could do tweetups, I suppose, but only a few of us Twitter. Email doesn't work well, since not everyone has a smartphone. But everyone *does* have mobiles and *can* text--so, we're sending grouptexts. The Blackberry's messaging client, at least, let's you send a single text to a group of mobile numbers.

Simple and useful.

In Wired, a long article on the relationship between and relative aspirations of Google and Facebook. 

WIRED MAGAZINE: 17.07

Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet -- and Keep Google Out

By Fred Vogelstein 06.22.09

Larry Page should have been in a good mood. It was the fall of 2007, and Google's cofounder was in the middle of a five-day tour of his company's European operations in Zurich, London, Oxford, and Dublin. The trip had been fun, a chance to get a ground-floor look at Google's ever-expanding empire. But this week had been particularly exciting, for reasons that had nothing to do with Europe; Google was planning a major investment in Facebook, the hottest new company in Silicon Valley.

Originally Google had considered acquiring Facebook--a prospect that held no interest for Facebook's executives--but an investment was another enticing option, aligning the Internet's two most important companies. Facebook was more than a fast-growing social network. It was, potentially, an enormous source of personal data. Internet users behaved differently on Facebook than anywhere else online: They used their real names, connected with their real friends, linked to their real email addresses, and shared their real thoughts, tastes, and news. Google, on the other hand, knew relatively little about most of its users other than their search histories and some browsing activity.

But now, as Page took his seat on the Google jet for the two-hour flight from Zurich to London, something appeared to be wrong. He looked annoyed, one of his fellow passengers recalls. It turned out that he had just received word that the deal was off. Microsoft, Google's sworn enemy, would be making the investment instead--$240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the company, meaning that Redmond valued Facebook at an astonishing $15 billion.

As the 767 took off, Page tersely but calmly shared the news with the others on the plane and answered their questions for about 15 minutes. "Larry was clearly, clearly unhappy about it," the passenger says.

Page soon got over it, but Facebook's rejection was still a blow to Google; it had never lost a deal this big and this publicly. But according to Facebookers involved in the transaction, Mountain View never had much of a chance--all things being equal, Microsoft was always the favored partner. Google's bid was used primarily as a stalking horse, a tool to amp up the bidding. Facebook executives weren't leaping at the chance to join with Google; they preferred to conquer it. "We never liked those guys," says one former Facebook engineer. "We all had that audacity, 'Anything Google does, we can do better.' No one talked about MySpace or the other social networks. We just talked about Google."

Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn't just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet--its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms--rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire--rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

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A piece in Fast Company dreads Google Wave.  (See also this earlier post.) 

Five Reasons to Be Terrified of Google Wave

By Chris Dannen

May 28, 2009

Google Wave, announced today at Google's I/O Developer conference in San Francisco, is a hybridized email system that will fundamentally change the way we think about electronic messaging. This is foreboding for at least five reasons.

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See "5 of the coolest and useful Twitter applications" at La Banda 2 Cero.  I hadn't heard of any of these. 

1. Twitoria: analytics for your Twitter followers. Unfollow people who aren't active. 
2. TweetGrid: excellent Twitter search. 
3. ACAMIN: file sharing for Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. 
4. Twitter Friends Network Browser: visualize your tweets.  See below--this one is really cool!
5. Twittervision 3D: visualization of global tweets. 

See this entry from the Double-Tongued Dictionary about "Office 2.0"--the notion that workers are not using their organizations' IT but rather are using consumer-oriented software and devices. 

Quotation:Savvy office workers frustrated that their on-the-job computer tools don’t function as smoothly as, say, an Apple iPod are taking matters into their own hands. No longer are they relying on company technicians, or information technology (IT) administrators, to choose the software needed to get the job done. They know how to pluck tools right off the Web. Industry observers use the term "consumerization" to describe the phenomenon whereby office workers are less likely to wait for the IT folks to equip them. [...] Forrester refers to the movement toward user control and individual empowerment as "Technology Populism," others refer to it as "Office 2.0."

I've blogged about this before... search "consumerization" for some representative posts. 

("The Double-Tongued Dictionary records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English, with a focus on slang, jargon, and new words. This site strives to record terms and expressions that are absent from, or are poorly covered in, mainstream dictionaries.") 

Here is The Economist's (one of my favorite magazines) style guide.

Together with the Chicago Manual of Style, it's everything you need to know.

In socialmediatoday, a short and sensible guide to writing Twitter posts: 

Twitter Style Guide

by Sherry Main on June 19 2009, 02:13

Just like print media and even blog posts, Twitter should have a style guide. There are some tweets that I will never read because they just look plain ugly.

Many people tweet just for the sake of sharing what’s on their mind. But if you truly want to call attention to what you’re writing, especially if you are promoting a corporate or personal brand, here’s a simple guide to help make your tweets "legible":

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"Leave enough space to be retweeted"--this was a new one for me.

The article also points to "5 Rules for Blogging."

One of the underappreciated aspects of Twitter is the power of searching it. 

7 "Secret" Ways To Use Twitter Search

June 25, 2009

By Thomas Baekdal.

Twitter Search is just amazing because it can give you real-time feedback about pretty much everything. That is, if you know how to look for it. Here is how:

Before we start I need to point out that both TweetDeck and Seesmic (my two favorite Twitter apps - with Seesmic being the #1) allows you to open special search panels, allowing you to “follow” a search term, instead of a person.

This is a great way to keep on top of things.

The Secrets---

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In Mashable, a summary of upcoming changes to sharing of status updates:

Twitter Envy: Facebook Adds Public Content Sharing

June 24th, 2009 | by Jennifer Van Grove

Facebook’s Publisher -- aka, the "What’s on your mind?" box on your homepage, was recently overhauled to support smart links, video, photos and other options.

Today, however, Facebook is announcing even more updates to Publisher, which will let users control the privacy settings around each status updates they post to Facebook. Beta testers, and eventually the rest of us, will now be able to specify whether they want to update the world or just a select group of friends.

The new Publisher will now have a lock icon in the lower right hand corner, where users can select to share updates with everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends, just friends, or a custom list. It’s important to note that the share with everyone option is essentially going to make your Facebook status updates public domain, and this has major implications for the upcoming release Facebook Search.

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Jack (and Suzy) Welch's column in the June 15, 2009, Business Week: "Why We Tweet." 

We're now big fans of Twitter. To those with eyebrows aloft, here's how it happened

By Jack and Suzy Welch

You know you're doing something strange and new--or at least new--when every time you're at a social gathering, the activity comes up and the barbs come out. "Why do you waste your time with such nonsense?" people ask. And so it is with Twitter, the social-networking thingamajig that we both recently adopted with a degree of enthusiasm that surprises our friends and family and, well, even us.

But the fact is, over the past few months, we've come to love Twitter. We're not saying it's going to transform humanity--as some of its proponents will tell you--but we certainly get its incipient power. Indeed, if Twitter continues to expand at its current rate, it may well become a high-value way for companies to help brand themselves and microtarget consumer groups, as well as another tool for managers to interact with their people, and vice versa.

But Twitter's business potential doesn't explain why we tap away in 140-character bursts every so often. O.K., like three or four times a day.

We tweet because we can't stop ourselves.

Why? Well, not for the reason we first expected. In fact, one of us (that would be @suzywelch in the lingo) started tweeting for good old-fashioned marketing purposes. She had a book coming out, and everyone-in-the-know kept insisting: "Social media is where it's happening."

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The June 15, 2009, issue of Business Week comprises a major feature on cloud computing.  The lead article is "How Cloud Computing Will Change Business." 

In today's The New York Times, an article about checking BlackBerrys during meetings and how it's still annoying to many.  (It's not just a BlackBerry thing!!  People do email, Twitter, and text on a variety of devices, including--especially, at Dartmouth and Dartmouth-Hitchcock--laptops.) 

I resolve to do better myself about this, and to influence others to do the same. 

Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners

By ALEX WILLIAMS

For the first half-hour of the meeting, it was hardly surprising to see a potential client fiddling with his iPhone, said Rowland Hobbs, the chief executive of a marketing firm in Manhattan.

At an hour, it seemed a bit much. And after an hour and a half, Mr. Hobbs and his colleagues wondered what the man could possibly be doing with his phone for the length of a summer blockbuster.

Someone peeked over his shoulder. "He was playing a racing game," Mr. Hobbs said. "He did ask questions, though, peering occasionally over his iPhone."

But, Mr. Hobbs added, "we didn’t say anything. We still wanted the business."

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.

But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

In Hollywood, both the Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency ban BlackBerry use at meetings. Tom Golisano, a billionaire and power broker in New York State politics, said last week that he pushed to remove Malcolm A. Smith as the State Senate majority leader after the senator met with him on budget matters in April and spent the time reading e-mail on his BlackBerry.

The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds -- and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.

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Posted today at MIT's Technology Review, work at Dartmouth: 

Cell Phones That Listen and Learn

New software tracks a user's behavior by monitoring everyday sounds.

By Kristina Grifantini

Researchers are increasingly using cell phones to better understand users' behavior and social interactions. The data collected from a phone's GPS chip or accelerometer, for example, can reveal trends that are relevant to modeling the spread of disease, determining personal health-care needs, improving time management, and even updating social-networks. The approach, known as reality mining, has also been suggested as a way to improve targeted advertising or make cell phones smarter: a device that knows its owner is in a meeting could automatically switch its ringer off, for example.

Now a group at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, NH, has created software that uses the microphone on a cell phone to track and interpret a user's situation. The software, called SoundSense, picks up sounds and tries to classify them into certain categories. In contrast to similar software developed previously, SoundSense can be trained by the user to recognize completely unfamiliar sounds, and it also runs entirely on the device. SoundSense automatically classifies sounds as "voice," "music," or "ambient noise." If a sound is repeated often enough or for long enough, SoundSense gives it a high "sound rank" and asks the user to confirm that it is significant and offers the option to label the sound.

The Dartmouth team focused on monitoring sound because every phone has a microphone and because GPS doesn't work well indoors, while accelerometers provide only limited information. "When we think about sounds, we don't typically think that they can also represent a location that has a unique signature," says Andrew Campbell, an associate professor of computer science at Dartmouth and a lead researcher on the project. The researchers made sure the program is small, so that it doesn't use too much power. To address privacy concerns, they designed SoundSense so that information is not removed from the device for processing. Additionally, the program itself doesn't store raw audio clips. A user can also tell the software to ignore any sounds deemed off limits.

In testing, the SoundSense software was able to correctly determine when the user was in a particular coffee shop, walking outside, brushing her teeth, cycling, and driving in the car. It also picked up the noise of an ATM machine and a fan in a particular room. The results of the experiments will be presented this week at the MobiSys 2009 conference, in Krakow, Poland.

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See this very handy graphic of differences between Facebook and Twitter.  Some of the numbers may be arguable, but the "Which one should you use" comparison is good. 

(Posted on Flickr by metrobest, but, other than that, I don't know the graphic's origin.) 

In TECH & LEARNING, actually a list of ways to use Twitter.  I do many of these. 

25 Ways to Teach with Twitter 

Sonja Cole, Jun 4 2009 9:17AM

Twitter can feel like a strange new landscape when you first jump in. It is not always clear what its professional uses are, or what to post in 140 characters or less. But when you start to think of Twitter as a micro-blog (and not just a forum for the personal minutiae of people’s daily lives), you will find that Twitter can be a valuable tool for professional development. Here are 25 ways that teachers can use Twitter to ask for help, get lesson plan ideas, book and professional resource recommendations, connect with other professionals, and even host an online book club.

First, a guide to Twitter shorthand. You will see examples of these in the sample tweets that follow:

• @username: creates a link to that user in your post.
• RT: Retweet, to copy someone else's post in a new update. Give them credit by adding their @username.
• #: hashtag, helps to organize your tweets into categories for easier searching.
• DM: Direct message, send a tweeter a private message instead of an update that all your followers can read.

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In today's The New York Times, a thoughtful summary of the power of Twitter in politics:

Twitter on the Barricades: Six Lessons Learned

By NOAM COHEN

Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools. The American Revolution wasn’t caused by the proliferation of pamphlets, written to whip colonists into a frenzy against the British. But it sure helped.

Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter, the newest social-networking tool, has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months — in Moldova in April and in Iran last week, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to oppose the official results of the presidential election.

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means — individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites — were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists’ access to events, the protesters have used Twitter’s agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or “tag,” each of their tweets with the same bit of type — #IranElection — so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution. But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth.

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In Mashable: The Social Media Guide: "Poll Everywhere is a tool to live poll an audience using text messages and tweets, direct to your PowerPoint slide. The live text walls and charts update instantly."

HOW TO: Conduct Live Polls via Twitter and SMS

June 16th, 2009 | by Ben Parr

Quick Pitch: Poll Everywhere is a tool to live poll an audience using text messages and tweets, direct to your PowerPoint slide. The live text walls and charts update instantly.

Genius Idea: Say you’re running a contest and want to have the audience help pick a winner. Or maybe you’re a professor and want to get student input. Maybe you just want to make an interactive presentation or poll your Twitter followers. What’s the best way to poll the group? Electronic clickers are expensive, but guess what? Everyone’s got a phone.

That’s where Poll Everywhere comes in handy. Poll Everywhere utilizes everyone’s mobile phone and transforms them into electronic polling devices. How, you ask? By text message, of course! The process to create and implement a poll is amazingly easy. Pick from three poll types: multiple choice, free choice, and "goal poll", set your question and answers, the ways people can respond, and poof! You’re done.

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The bummer is, it's not free.

The veteran John Dvorak describes the perfect mobile phone device in this column in PCMag.com:

The Perfect Mobile Phone Is (Nearly) Here

ARTICLE DATE: 06.15.09

By John C. Dvorak

As the world begins to adjust to the mobile phone as a computing platform, we have to recognize the fact that for many people the device is bound to become the complete substitute for all computing needs. But not quite in the form we see it. I've written about this idea as far back as 1993, but this concept should be reexamined: We need to be in the right frame of mind for what's coming.

First of all the iPhone has set the stage for the future in much the same way that the Apple II set the stage for what became personal computing. And I can see things unfolding in much the same way. But the iPhone itself (or whatever device people end up using) needs at least two more iterations to become the desktop replacement. Let's start with some minimal requirements. First of all, a 250GB or bigger drive of some sort will be needed. And a processor with enough power to run both slim phone apps and robust office apps.

Each device must have a large connector on the bottom onto which any variety of dongles can be attached for input and output. The device should also fit into a cradle or docking station so it can be hooked directly to a keyboard and large screen. There should be no intermediary computer involved. Dock at work and it becomes the desktop replacement, where you do word processing and everything else. Then you pocket it and perhaps dock at home, or use it for its other mobile capabilities.

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Paul Thurrott in Windows IT Pro writes about why Google's recent release of "Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook" portends a big deal: being able to replace an expensive Exchange server with a hosted Google solution--and the users would "keep using Outlook with virtually all the same capabilities." (D-H would likely not do this, since, all things being equal, we would prefer to have our data on our servers.) 

Google Rains on Microsoft's Exchange Parade

June 16, 2009

Paul Thurrott

Over the past year, Microsoft Exchange Server has evolved from a traditional on-premise server to an online service, one that Microsoft itself will host, service, and support. That's quite an accomplishment, and it neatly answers complaints I and others have made about some of Microsoft's recent business-oriented products, including Small Business Server 2008. Such products are increasingly powerful, yes, but also increasingly complex.

Microsoft's decision to morph its traditional server products into hosted online services will be a huge win for its enterprise customers especially, and I feel that this kind of solution will eventually outpace on-premise server installations in both revenue and licenses. But enterprises aren't where the growth is these days in the server business. And when you look at the small-to-midsized business (SMBs) that will most benefit from the lack of complexity in Microsoft's hosted solutions, you realize there's still a gap: Microsoft's hosted offerings are just too expensive.

Racing to fill this gap is Google, best known for its online search engine but increasingly encroaching on Microsoft's bread-and-butter business customers. If you're still of the opinion that Google's business solutions are cute but immature, it's time to stop chuckling condescendingly and pay attention. Sure, Google has a way to go in the enterprise, but its business wares are getting better all the time. And most of them are free, or nearly so.

Helping Google somewhat, of course, is the current economic downturn, but let's be serious here: Saving money is always in season. And as more and more SMBs look for ways to stay competitive while cutting costs, they're going to turn away from Microsoft's comparatively expensive solutions and increasingly toward Google's free and inexpensive solutions. That's especially true if what Google offers is functionality identical, or at least very similar, to what's available from Microsoft.

And that's exactly what Google offers. The Google Apps solution, although initially derided for its technical immaturity, has really taken off with educational institutions and small businesses, and Google says the business is making money to the tune of "a few hundred million" dollars of revenue per year. But its latest related initiative is a small utility announced via a barely read corporate blog. This utility, Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, is a deep advance into Microsoft territory, hitting the software giant right where it hurts by letting customers migrate from expensive and complex Exchange Server solutions to inexpensive or free Google Apps while retaining their Microsoft Office Outlook clients.

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Yesterday's The New York Times has a story about the role of Twitter in Iran's contested presidential election: "The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over."

Everyone has a mobile phone, and anyone can use Twitter. 

U.S. Steps Gingerly Into Tumult in Iran

By MARK LANDLER and BRIAN STELTER

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration says it has tried to avoid words or deeds that could be portrayed as American meddling in Iran’s presidential election and its tumultuous aftermath.

Yet on Monday afternoon, a 27-year-old State Department official, Jared Cohen, e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.

The request, made to a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is yet another new-media milestone: the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country.

"This was just a call to say: ‘It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?’" said P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs.

Twitter complied with the request, saying in a blog post on Monday that it put off the upgrade until late Tuesday afternoon -- 1:30 a.m. Wednesday in Tehran -- because its partners recognized "the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran." The network was working normally again by Tuesday evening.

The State Department said its request did not amount to meddling. Mr. Cohen, they noted, did not contact Twitter until three days after the vote was held and well after the protests had begun.

"This is completely consistent with our national policy," Mr. Crowley said. "We are proponents of freedom of expression. Information should be used as a way to promote freedom of expression."

The episode demonstrates the extent to which the administration views social networking as a new arrow in its diplomatic quiver. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton talks regularly about the power of e-diplomacy, particularly in places where the mass media are repressed.

Mr. Cohen, a Stanford University graduate who is the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, has been working with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other services to harness their reach for diplomatic initiatives in Iraq and elsewhere.

Last month, he organized a visit to Baghdad by Mr. Dorsey and other executives from Silicon Valley and New York’s equivalent, Silicon Alley. They met with Iraq’s deputy prime minister to discuss how to rebuild the country’s information network and to sell the virtues of Twitter.

Referring to Mir Hussein Moussavi, the main Iranian opposition candidate, Mr. Crowley said, "We watched closely how Moussavi has used Facebook to keep his supporters informed of his activities."

Tehran has been buzzing with tweets, the posts of Twitter subscribers, sharing news on rallies, police crackdowns on protesters, and analysis of how the White House is responding to the drama.

With the authorities blocking text-messaging on cellphones, Twitter has become a handy alternative for information-hungry Iranians. While Iran has also tried to block Twitter posts, Iranians are skilled at using proxy sites or other methods to circumvent the official barriers.

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