Every few months I delete my Facebook account citing lack of ethics in their business model and the way it's being executed. The FTC agrees with me, Austrians and Germans agree with me, and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada agrees with me. Facebook consistently seeks to undermine the illusion of privacy they present to us, and to violate laws and the rights of its users to perpetually maintain a "social graph" that contains mind-bogglingly detailed information about each and every person on the service including what websites you visit (that have a like or connect button installed), and what actions you do and personal information you share on many of these sites. I then inevitably sign up again to access their API in order to stay current as a developer where clients need to access people, and if their target audience is on Facebook; the client needs to be on Facebook too, and I better know how to give them that access.

What does Facebook have to do with identity? There's a new feature in Facebook's account settings that allows you to link your Facebook account with what are considered other identity providers (ie: Google, Yahoo) using OpenID. This means you can log into Facebook with credentials from these other services; and/or if you happen to log out of Facebook and into say Google a Like button on someone's blog would still recognize you as logged into Facebook. So what's in a username when a username is only weakly linked to your identity?

An email address is strongly linked to your identity; I can send you an email, but because email addresses are easy to spoof I cannot be sure an email is really from you without extra layers of security that aren't for the average user, or a really good Turing test which is unfeasible especially in the age of social networks where relationships are just as easy for anyone to discover and spoof. An email address is analogous to a driver's licence. Underage people create accounts with fake birthdays to get around COPPA just as they get a fake licence to buy beer. It's unfeasible for the average person to create fake driver's licenses as it is for them to hack into someone's email account; but fairly trivial for people to acquire the knowledge to use both technologies for identity theft or spoofing.

In the real world your identity is a culmination of the information that resides in other people's brains and in 'the system' about you. You are the impact you have on the world. In a court of law where identifying you can mean the death penalty or not, the only thing more convincing than DNA is DNA plus photo evidence plus eye-witness testimony plus a trail of other evidence. It is fairly trivial to plant some DNA as it is to hack into someone's online accounts; it's easy to brute force, phish, or Firesheep an account and gain access to credentials. In a digital world gaining access to and duping the bits used as a digital passport is easy, it's hard to post a thousand status updates, photos, and blog posts over a period of years as someone else while over those years interacting with other real people in that person's life. Because identity is a culmination of the impact you have.

People get upset when they can't access the first of their ten thousand tweets; no matter how trivial it was; because it's perceived as a part of their identity. Our history and our breadcrumbs are our identity. Our interaction with the world is accumulated validation that we are who we unconsciously present ourselves to be. When logging into online banking or anything else that requires extra security we set up secret questions and answers about our identity; and symbiotically depending on what parts of my life history is exposed to a given observer the nature of their perception of my identity is accordingly changed —Yet I wouldn't go so far as to say that we have multiple identities because of it. If two people are looking at the same sculpture from two different angles, then there are not two sculptures; only two representations of the same sculpture. There are no two people in my life who have the exact same account and there is no person including me who has the full account of my identity. The vast majority of our lives are forgotten or not known even to us. For example if someone found an old journal that belonged to your great great great great grandfather, reading it would add to your knowledge of your identity; it would uncover a part of your identity. There is no reason why a computer program could not be one of the mediums to store and retrieve parts of your identity, but your identity follows and remains attached to you.

Your family impacts your identity and so does your social interaction, as well as your knowledge and experience acquired. Identity rubs off and is transient. I am who I am because of who everyone else is. It's not just attached to my consciousness or my physical body, but both, and everything else those two things have together or individually interacted with either physically, digitally, or vicariously. Identity is a culmination of the impact you have on the world. Any website where you make an account wether strongly or weakly tied to your identity is merely a representation and thus an extension of it.

There are no social networks. There are only tools and services with social features. Google+, Facebook, and Twitter are all broadcasting and link discovery tools, and they are all ways to waste time. Forget about the motives and business models of the companies and their inherent overlap. Google+ gives you more finely tuned and personal search results, Twitter allows for trends to be easily sparked and monitored, and Facebook exposes your breadcrumbs to help you find people and discover parts of their identity that would otherwise be hidden to you. None of these things are inherently good or bad in theory and none of them are a complete picture of you.

The idea of only using one social network, or only having one ultimate online identity is not only silly (because they are all merely representations of your identity), but it leaves you vulnerable to exploitation. You should have many online accounts and many places where you publicly aggregate and maintain a list and links to those accounts so that if one goes out of business you still have breadcrumbs, and so that if one gets hacked you can mention it on all the others. You should use different login credentials so that it's totally unfeasible for anyone to gain access to the majority of them, and so that the patterned imprint of your identity on the web becomes easy to tell apart from what a given hacker would do with your account if they gained access to one of them. You should treat everything you post as public because it ultimately is and consider it to be public domain. The notion that these companies respect what's in their TOS is a marketing gimmick, although you can still use tools given to differentiate these public parts of your identity it is and should be seen merely as a form of curation rather than any form of security; and you should seek to maintain aspects of your identity privately, offline, and between close relatives and friends.

After waiting patiently since Wednesday afteroon for my invite to work(It's 4:30am Friday right now) It finally did.

Foot in the door

The first thing you're asked is if you'd like to enable +1 on non-Google sites. Right off the bat, compared to Facebook, the explanation of where and how my content will appear on non-Google sites if I enable this feature is very clear. I'm enabling it for now but there are some security/privacy risks which I'll get into in a future post.

Privacy

You also get a link to the Privacy Policy before signup. Google's Privacy Policy incorporates their Google-wide policy — which if you have a Google account you've already agreed to (~1660 words), and if you use the mobile version of G+ it instead incorporates their mobile specific policy (~1070 words). If you upload a photo to Google+ you're also agreeing to the Picasa Privacy Policy (~795 words). If you use the +1 button you're agreeing to the +1 Privacy Policy (~420 words). The Google+ (Plus) specific policy adds (~1035 words) of amendments so it totals around 3500 words, as Google already had hundreds of millions of users who'd already agreed to their sitewide policy and Picasa's there's only around 1500 words of new policy for their social layer. Contrast this with Facebook's Privacy Policy (~5850 words), which you have to click through from an overview page describing privacy controls (~1260 words), an expansive Privacy FAQ, 25 external privacy information links, 8 minutes of video explaining Privacy on Facebook, as well as the Privacy Policy of every app you use on the Facebook platform. In addition to Google being an order of magnitude more concise, the Google+ Privacy Policy is also written in much clearer wording. Look forward to my deconstruction of the Google+ Privacy Policy in a future post. What stands out is:

• that participants added to any group conversation may be able to see the entire history of the conversation. Since anyone in a conversation can essentially add anyone else, consider everything you post to Google+ public.
• If you use a third-party app like TweetDeck to post to Google+ the developer of the app has access to all the information you have access to. So consider everything you post to Google+ public as anyone of your contacts may use a third party app giving that developer access to all your posts.
• During the next step in the signup process you're shown a window requiring that you connect Picasa Web Albums to your Google+ account, so your photos are available to you. Your albums' visibility settings aren't changed, but people they are shared with can now share them with anyone else. So consider photos you share on Google+ public.

While these last three points may change the way you use Google+ at least they're upfront about how little control you have of a post once you post it online. Other social networks would prefer you not realize this.

Experience

annnnd I'm in.

It looks incredible, very clear and fresh. The interface is snappy and responsive and shows me little messages the first time I do something telling me what's about to happen.

No ads to be seen anywhere, hard to say at this point if that's because it's a "limited field test" or as competitive advantage. It would be great if when I'm looking at my social timeline I'm not bombarded with ads as apposed to Facebook where the ads mention my friends' names and is awkward and uncomfortable. Better targeted ads on other Google properties, and a clean social experience.

Hangouts are awesome, and simple to use.. Can't wait to try it out with some people when invites go live again. You'll need to download the Google Talk plugin. Google Talk is also integrated with G+, you get the same chat widget that's been around in GMail for a while except there's no dialpad and it's integrated with circles.

Photos looks really good, instead of a gallery of evenly sized thumbnails you have a dynamic spread of recent photos with a little bubble showing the number of comments each one has, clicking on a photo opens a better looking lightbox where you can see photo metadata, fly through the entire album, and photo comments are on the side so I can scroll through comments and leave one while still looking at the photo.

Your account settings are very clear, easy to understand, and well organized. There aren't many settings you need to configure. The first panel "Account overview" lets you manage your account and provides two links at the bottom to Delete your profile and remove associated social features, and to Close account and delete all services and info associated with it. They've also devoted a section of your account settings to Data liberation which is a simple set of 6 links to download all your data.

Things you can keep private —like who you're friends with, are very simple to control. Deciding "who gets to see what" is ingrained in the way you post and use the site, and it's clear that Circles are about managing who you're sending posts to, not creating an air-tight controlled network where your data is 100% private. This is a good thing, Google's not obfuscating the ultimate lack of control a given person on the internet has over their content once it's posted online, they're instead making it clear that it's up to the people you choose to trust and share with to respect your privacy —which is in fact the case on other social networks and anywhere else on the web; including email, despite what those sites would lead you to believe through branding or convoluted privacy policies and UI.

Google makes it very easy to:

• See what data they have
• Download your data to your computer
• Remove your data from Google's servers

Issues

There's a little option arrow on each post that let's you disable comments/resharing, but if I'm not looking at the Stream when I post then I don't have those options. There also doesn't seem to be a global way to disable resharing.

Yeah it's a field test and no one's using it yet, but when G+ does go live, I'd expect there to be a better way to find interesting people to follow. I'm talking your Scott Siglers, Leo Laportes, Gina Trapanis, and Keith Malleys. Right now (and rightly so) it's more geared towards finding your friends and family.

Invites

It looks like any computer in my house can now signup for Google+, but people are still getting a "capacity exceeded" message. Invites have also been temporarily disabled, but if you want an invite just email me your gmail address or post it in the comments below, and I'll invite you when I can.

Google+ was announced yesterday and is currently being field tested. Scheduled to be slowly rolled out to users.

What is Google+?

It's a social sharing layer being added to Google. Their answer to Facebook, Twitter, Skype.

(scroll down for videos and demos)

I'm leaving Facebook as soon as Google+ opens — or as soon as I get an invite and can invite the people I care about.

Why

Facebook is hella boring, only a few people post more than once a day, there's a stalker mentality, endless privacy fuck ups, and over time the software has become complicated and bulky not less. The Facebook iPhone app is really badly executed from a design and usability perspective. Google+'s Sparks where they feed people interesting news based on their interests will finally give "non-broadcasters" something to talk about and share. It's like mushing Google Alerts and StumbleUpon into Facebook.

Group video is huge a pain with Skype, and there's no iPad version; the iPad compatible version is just a tiny square. Call quality is frequently terrible, and it's awkward for people to start a video conversation. Working with a distributed team and trying to keep track of everyone's hours; when they're knee deep in code, or out to lunch is reason enough to get a personal assistant. Google+'s Hangouts is like a living room in your office that's actually in your social network. People can join and leave when they're available, videoconferencing where the video being shared or person talking loudest takes center stage. It's like a really natural Sococo that doesn't force you to play with little avatars.

Twitter's character limit is irritating now and I don't want to post to 3 social networks anymore. Every social sphere is on every social network, and Facebook privacy is non-existent. So I'm just posting multiple public messages to randomly dispersed people, and a lot of overlap. Yeah, you can go to a Twitter profile and quickly see a person's updates and absorb a lot of information in a glance from a set of guaranteed-concise updates; but who does that? Yeah you can get your public updates indexed by Google but only a few, a feat not even possible on Facebook. And quite frankly I don't care about all of a person's updates. Using Google+'s Circles to target who get's a given update means fewer, and more meaningful updates — rather than forcing wordplay and brevity.

With Twitter you think about what you post more and how to word it to make it fit, but that's conformity and a focus on structure over content. What you end up seeing is the Twitter version of the people you care about. I want to see the real version. I want to see the thought they had in the moment, worded the way they talk without all these barriers, and supplemented by links; videos; and images —and I want the interface to be clean and minimalist. Twitter's custom backgrounds and colours are a huge flaw.

Twitter also goes down a lot, and only lets you access your last 3200 tweets. Both traits seem a bit ridiculous for a social network that encourages you to post every off the cuff thought.

Demo

Here's the interactive demo, make sure you hit "Take the tour" to get it started.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/

Videos

Here's a link to the full Google+ playlist, just go into Fullscreen and it'll play though them all
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwnJ5Bl4kLI&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=SPF3DFB800F05F551A

Richard MacManus over at ReadWriteWeb posted an article today detailing Why Twitter Must Expand Beyond 140 Characters. This is a counter post detailing the opposite.

Twitter No Longer About Constraints

Twitter and Facebook are not in competition, they serve two very different functions. Twitter is for following brief status updates from people and things you’re interested in, while Facebook is for sharing your life with close friends and family in an efficient detached manner.

That Extra Click: The User Experience Issue

There is a user experience issue with having to click a link to read tweets that are longer than 140 characters; but the issue isn’t with Twitter, it’s with the external service which is not a good fit for Twitter. Having to click to get extra content—ie: Twitter’s simplicity (and it’s open API), is what made it so successful and able to have such a vibrant ecosystem of apps and experiences. The new Twitter layout solves a significant amount of extra clicks showing plenty of externally linked media from tweets on the Twitter website without leaving the experience.

Will Twitter Producers Pollute Twitter With Long Tweets?

It’s irrelevant how often people post long tweets. Twitter can’t drop the 140 character limit because it was designed to be used with SMS. Many people still write and read tweets via SMS on their mobile phone, and allowing longer tweets wouldn’t solve anything. Those people would still be limited to only 140 characters, and any tweets longer than 140 characters would be sent to their mobile phone all wonky and separated or broken up.

Other Languages Already Send Long Messages on Twitter

This just refutes the last point. But it also provides a solution, if you want longer tweets, learn Chinese.

Twitter Needs to Expand Beyond 140 Characters to Continue Growing

This is just false. Twitter’s brevity is it’s value as the character limit urges elegance, and allows it to be integrated beautifully with even small simple devices and web apps. Twitter is in the middle of transitioning to the new layout, and there’s a ton of room for Twitter to expand in terms of analysis and practical uses of their vast sums of data.

Twitter keeps hitting record usage levels and their service is becoming more and more mainstream as it becomes popular around the world. More important than character limits is expanding their infrastructure for uptime ie: they can barely handle 140 characters, but perhaps more importantly for access.

Being able to Tweet from anywhere in the world in the face of a government shutting down the internet – via SMS and Google Voice, and perhaps in the future self healing P2P networks is a must. Getting an image of your country’s secret police force throwing molotov cocktails at protestors from rooftops to the world is at the very least facilitated by the fact that there are hundreds of services that easily integrate with Twitter and a hundred different ways of getting an image like that onto many different services and getting the Tweet out. If Twitter starts expanding to overshadow its simplistic ecosystem as a status distribution network, preventing posting of such pictures to a mass audience will simply mean blocking the twitter website. All your eggs in one basket.

Apple has announced a new subscription service for iOS read: recurring in-app purchases. Apps will be able to take advantage of Apple’s system but publishers are required to give Apple a 30% cut and are not allowed to raise the price of subscription to accomodate the lost revenue. Content makers still have the option of managing subscriptions externally bypassing Apple’s new subscription management service where they’d keep 100% of revenue as per usual.

• The benefit to subscribers is increased privacy control with your name and email address, and you can subscribe to more content without worrying if the publisher has safeguards for your credit card information.
• The benefit to publishers is that it’s easier to build a reputation for content. The alternative route would be to make an app and give free subscriptions until you build a reputation and then setup a whole billing mechanism and suddenly start charging your subscribers – which is a bumpier ride.

Google also just announced Google One Pass which is essentially the same concept but with a focus on the internet as a whole and built as an extension to their Google Checkout system. The key difference between the two services is that Apple is offering an optional subscription management system for apps in their app stores, while Google is offering one for the entire internet and mobile apps “who’s mobile OS terms permit transactions outside of the app market.” Unless Apple blocks using the One Pass API via their terms – like they did when Adobe added compile for iOS as an option in Flash Professional CS5, it seems like iOS market share will be the ground under contention here.

On the other hand Apple would likely negotiate separate deals with the big publishers, and having more subscription options for up and coming publishers – even if they’re not getting that 30% cut, still means more content targeted for iOS. With more and more apps being made with Android as a primary consideration Apple stands to gain by opening it’s doors to One Pass letting those publishers consolidate subscriptions in one service. I guess we’ll see how this evolves.

[Apple, Google] via [Ars Technica]

There's not much to say about it. I've read some other posts from really reputable blogs and for whatever reason they're all padded with nonsense. Facebook Mail is an extension of their messaging system that incorporates email, has a kind of priority inbox, and is all based on people rather than threads based on subject. Facebook is aggregating all the ways you communicate to better simulate a conversation as though you were standing next to the person.

It's a very specific style of communication that speaks directly to teenagers and the way they communicate. While teenagers could and should use a communication method that caters to them, and the new Facebook Messages does that really well, it's not for grown ups, or business, or anyone with any depth or complexity. It's advanced IM(instant messaging).

Grown ups need threads by subject - whether they choose to organize their inbox as individual messages or threaded, the subjects still differentiate the content of an email or conversation. I may do a lot of work for a client, the absolute last thing I would ever want is to scroll down a bit too far in the conversation and see specs for an old project and incorporate it accidentally in the new one. Or for the client to pitch an idea for a new project, which get's muddled with the current project, or requires a paragraph explaining that it's a different idea and just a pitch and has nothing to do with the current project. One of many examples where subject based organization is a far simpler paradigm.

Of course we all have a adolescent side - some more than others, and it's that same aspect of ourselves that Facebook appeals to when see what old friends are doing with their lives. It's that same part of our brains, that couples with short sightedness, that makes some people think that peer pressure is more important than preventing access to your personal online life from random third party applications. Why else would anyone do those stupid Facebook Quizzes? It explains why some people believe there's enough value in completing a quiz to give up the keys to their personal life to some shady app developer. Or at least the same short sightedness that becomes so overwhelmed by the social pressures of Facebook that they've never read the TOS or Privacy Policy. Never mind Facebook's but of the third party quizzing application who can do whatever they want with your data.

The two other issues with integrating Facebook Messages with your email is lack of respect and trust. Giving someone your Facebook email address is an immediate indicator that you don't want communication with that person (or company) to be too complex. You're saying, "Here's my Facebook Email, I'd prefer it if everything we say to each other from now on was part of the same conversation cause DUuuueah I lack the ability for context". As for trust there are two main categories of people. Those who trust Facebook (unfamiliar with their history, never read the Terms, unaware of the frequent privacy control resets, etc.) and those who don't trust Facebook (people with common sense, people who don't live in a bubble, people who can read).

While I've recently had to reactivate my Facebook account after two years so I could access their developer API for work (I got out during a significant Intelectual Property and Privacy blowup in 2008), I refuse to put any information on it that isn't already public. Why, because I don't trust them. Facebook has done a lot of things in their past that are notably untrustworthy. Their whole approach is based on peer pressure and pushing people around how they see fit, their privacy controls are only meaningful until they decide they're not - which happens frequently enough, and they don't appropriately abstract apps or themselves from your personal data.

Why would I trust a free service like Google with email and documents and stuff, but not Facebook? Well for one I know that Google has serious restrictions dictating which of their employees have access to my data, even those few select people are meticulously logged and audited, and any violations result in firing and tighter security. On Facebook I have no idea which of their employees can access my data, and I know that at their whim a mere Privacy Policy update could result in all my controls being reset and my private information entering the public domain forever. If the controls are meaningless, and access is ambiguous then there's no trust.

For a simple analogy; Google is run as a republic. Microsoft is run as a corporation, Apple is run as a dictatorship, Facebook is run by a young dictator.

This is from http://deardrum.org/about/html5

What is HTML5 and why do I need it?

To put it simply HTML is what websites are made of. HTML5 is just the newest version.

DearDrum.org uses some pretty advanced stuff under the hood that's only available in HTML5. So in order to play audio on the site and do some other cool things you need a Web Browser that understands HTML5. (more on this below)

Fortunately there are a few really amazing web browsers out there that do support HTML5 really well. And if you're not comfortable switching to a new browser there's probably a plugin for your browser to get you on board.

Here are some quick links so you can get started, you only need one, but why not try them all if you have time. I'll go into a bit more detail and walk you through the issues below that if you're interested or confused by any of this.

Links:

Google Chrome is - in our professional opinion - the best web browser out there, hands down.
Download Google Chrome

Firefox is phenomenal too, and by far the most widely used browser that supports HTML5.
Download Firefox

Internet Explorer is, well, incompatible with everything. Google made a plugin called Chrome Frame which brings HTML5 to Internet Explorer. Despite some recent claims to the contrary IE9 will never support HTML5 by itself and requires Chrome Frame in all cases (more on this below).
Download Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer

Safari is in the same boat as Internet Explorer with regards to HTML5. They claim to support it but intentionally cripple its functionality. On a Mac you can install a plugin called XiphQT which will bring you up to speed. On Windows you'll need to switch to another browser to get proper HTML5 support.
Download the XiphQT plugin for Mac

Opera is a less known web browser that totally supports HTML5, and we love them for it.
Download Opera

So What is a Web Browser?

Yeah yeah, I get it. Now What is HTML5? Really.

You may have seen the code that makes up web pages. If you right click on this page you should see an option to view the source code of the page. That's HTML. Now the internet is an open place and as you can see there are lots of different browsers. So everyone kind of has to agree on the specifics of the HTML language. The specs for HTML5 aren't finalized yet but some of the more advanced browsers are already supporting most of HTML5 already. There is however a big argument going on surrounding HTML5 audio and video.

At the end of the day HTML5 will have to be open, because the web needs to be open. Imagine if you had to pay $5000 a month to use Google, and that money wasn't even to pay Google, it went to some licence holder who owned use of the letter E... That would be terrible and there'd be no innovation on the web. There'd have been no Facebook or WikiPedia, and no DearDrum.org.

What exactly is this HTML5 argument about?

Up until now HTML has not had any built in support for audio or video. If you wanted to play audio or video on the web you had to use a plugin like Adobe Flash Player. Which is fine, but Adobe is a profit motivated company and the web is an open place, so in the interest of choice and freedom the new version of HTML, HTML5 does have built in audio and video support.

Now the standards body that decides on what HTML5 will be is called W3C. Unfortunately the W3C is dominated by massive corporations who tend to dictate the standards in favour of their profit margin instead of what's best for an open, innovative web, and what's best for all of us. Up until now there hasn't really been much to debate over and it's been a long time since HTML4 came out anyway. Up until now Internet Explorer had majority market share and deliberately didn't follow the standards so web developers would have to focus on supporting IE's defunked and broken interpretation of HTML4. IE's massive market share was purely the result of being packaged with Windows. Microsoft has been sued over this anti-competitive practice because it directly hurt the web for so many years. During this time the other web browsers pushed to become faster and add amazing features to try gain as much market share as possible. It was IE vs. the world and Mozilla was their biggest rival with Firefox. If it wasn't for Firefox we'd all be eating dirt and living in shacks right now in a world where an open DearDrum.org could never even be conceived of.

The problem with HTML5 audio/video support is that everyone needs to agree on an audio and video format; in the same way .txt is a text format and .jpg is an image format. The issue is licensing. There happen to be some really great audio and video formats out there that are open source, meaning they can be freely used and improved upon by anyone. There also happen to be a lot of big faceless corporations in the W3C, see a list here, some of whom own part of the licensing rights to a particular format known as H.264.

When it comes to web browsers you have two sides of the argument. Those for an open web, and those whom want to charge everyone obscene amounts of money to use H.264. Currently the H.264 license allows people to use it. This free use has been extended to 2016 for the purposes of convincing non owners in the W3C - and the greater public, that it's free. After 2016 and quite frankly with the right high priced law firm any old time, that could expire and everyone would suddenly be charged $50 a day to watch youtube videos. Or $5000 a year to upload YouTube videos. If H.264 becomes the standard it would be a twisted joke and we would all be royally screwed.

Microsoft and Apple both own part of the H.264 licensing rights. So they've chosen only to support that format. They could easily support both H.264 and WebM(the open, free format), but they don't because they're hoping that they can prolong the debate long enough that developers will have to support H.264 to reach the majority of people who use those two browsers - both packaged and preinstalled with their respective operating systems.

Mozilla by it's very nature will always push for an open web, and Google's profit margin is directly tied to people's ability to generate content. Google went so far as to purchase the WebM format AND absolve the entire world from licensing fees should some obscure patent be discovered down the road and some sadistic person try capitalize on it. To Google it's a business expense, but it happened and it benefits everyone.

The WebM format is a container format, which uses VP8 for video, and OGG Vorbis for audio. For DearDrum.org we decided to use OGG Vorbis as our audio format.

Wow that was a lot to take in, so why does DearDrum.org use OGG Vorbis instead of MP3?

While most your music is probably in .mp3 format, it costs a lot of money to transcode audio into the .mp3 format due to licensing. And who knows when that price will go up. When creating DearDrum.org I didn't want to be at the mercy of some company, and we didn't want to charge people to download and use the DearDrum.org Desktop App. We went in favour of choice, freedom, and openness because we value those ideals; and we want the web to remain an innovative grounds for inspiring new ideas.

Feel free to skip down to The Good Stuff.

And when you're done here think about reading about the Boycott Facebook movement.

I left Facebook more than a year ago and it went like this. Unfortunately the final straw causing me to want to finally leave, was the same reason I couldn't. Deleting my Facebook account on that day under that TOS(Terms of Service) would mean Facebook had the right to use my identity, content, and likeness forever, in any context, for any reason. So I deleted all my content on Facebook instead, changed my profile to explain to all my friends what a giant scam and shady organization Facebook was. I hoped and waited for the day that Facebook changed their TOS to back to something less permanent, or at least forgot my old profile data/content.. which was unlikely to happen. The next day a few Facebook groups had already sprung up outraged at the new TOS and petitioning to reverse the horrific changes, they were all rapidly growing in support and I had a little hope.

A few days later Facebook responded, and temporarily reversed the changes to their TOS while they, to paraphrase, worked with users on a Facebook Bill of Rights. While the old TOS was still shady and demented the permanent ownership of YOU and right to sell/share YOU with any 3rd party(multi-teared) for any reason was lifted. Realizing Facebook's Bill of Rights Bologne was an obvious sham I deleted my account as fast as I could.

I've spent the last year trying to explain to people what a nightmare Facebook is, and what they're becoming - and not only was I right about the direction they were going in, but nobody listened or cared about (see: Understood) a word I was saying.

The Good Stuff - 15 Good Reasons to Ditch Facebook

1. Ever Changing Terms

Every time Facebook updates their TOS - which is quite often, it becomes more frightening, harder to leave Facebook, Facebook's rights to your identity, and right to share your private personal messages, images, and everything you put on Facebook gets more invasive and pervasive.

2. Auto-Resetting Privacy Controls

With every TOS update they kindly reset all your "privacy" controls to public for you, and it remains as such until you manually set it back to your preferred level of privacy.

You're required to race to Facebook when this happens and change them back before your parents and boss see the photos from that crazy kegger you were at last weekend, and before Google indexes your now public life letting it show up in people's Google searches.

3. Confusingly Complex Privacy Controls

Facebook's privacy controls are far too complex and convoluted for anyone to understand, and require an afternoon just to configure all of them. There's absolutely no reason for this other than to coax people into not setting them.

4. Irrelevant Privacy Controls

Facebook's privacy controls are irrelevant because the Facebook TOS allows Facebook to share all your activity and content with anyone in the world, regardless of your privacy settings. It doesn't matter if your boss can't log into Facebook and see embarrassing photos of you, when your boss can just call Facebook and ask them to send over all the photos you've ever posted, even private ones, even ones your friends posted and tagged you in.

5. Facebook Applications Can See Everything

Before I left Facebook I had made a small Facebook application. While I never used it for this purpose it shocked me to find out that even back then I, a 3rd party developer who had to provide no ID of any kind to Facebook, could access ALL OF THE PRIVATE INFORMATION AND CONTENT of anyone that added my application to their profile and ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS', AND FRIENDS OF FRIENDS' PRIVATE INFORMATION AND CONTENT. I could access everything, and I could do whatever I wanted with that information. I could visit your mother's house and hand her a printed out copy of an embarrassing photo of you. I could start a website where I just published all your personal information.

6. The new Facebook API - Social Graph

An API is when a website let's 3rd party programmers access their content from their 3rd party website or app. So the Twitter API let's TweetDeck login to Twitter for you and fetch your friends/updates/etc. so that you can see and interact with Twitter in TweetDeck.

At their recent developer conference, Facebook unveiled their new API which is currently available for use. It let's any website log into your Facebook and is Opt-Out. Which means you have to deliberately decide not to use it.

Every porn site, joke site, self-help site will soon have a small chunk of code added which automatically logs you into your Facebook account and gives the random site near total control of your Facebook profile.

Which means not only does ilikedonkeyshahahowdoistop.com know exactly who you are, who your friends are, and who their friends are, can post to your wall which videos you're watching, questions you're asking, pictures you're looking at. They can also create a Facebook group and make you a member of it, they can email your mother and tell her what you did on their site, they can Facebook message all your Friends and tell them how much you love their unique brand of porn, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Aside from ilikedonkeyshahahowdoistop.com being able to know and do all that and more without any real consent(that's now, soon you won't have to give any consent), Facebook also has all this data. Facebook knows your browsing habits, they know the content of every page you visit. EVEN if there's a mild warning that says "Would you like to let this site use your Facebook?" which there are many ways for the shady site to hide and obfuscate, even if you see that warning and click "No", that Alert/question comes from Facebook who knows exactly where you are on the web, exactly what the content of the page you're on is and can watch what you're doing there. So even if you stay on top of every setting Facebook gives you and opt out of everything, Facebook still knows everything you do on the internet and can and will share that information to ANYONE THEY WANT, ANY TIME IN THE FUTURE, and the 3rd parties they share it with are also allowed to share the data with anyone they want forever.

7. Beacon

Beacon was an ad program a while back, that sort of came back on and off, where Facebook would advertise to your friends - without your consent - in your name. For example, Facebook could show your friend Jenny a message saying that "you really like Bacon Slather -a revolutionary new product where you bath in grease, and that last Tuesday when you used it, you had an orgasm and called out her name." They would be able to do this, and did, regardless of whether you had even heard of Bacon Slather.

They would also turn things you did actually post into an ad. So if you posted an status update saying "Fred is a total douche" Facebook would not only be able to re-word your update, but they would turn the word douche into a link that took any of your friends who clicked on it to a porn site specializing in videos of women douching. The new Facebook API is the latest evolution of Beacon.

8. Facebook's Revenue

Facebook makes money, and is setting up greater infrastructure to make money, by selling your private(regardless of privacy settings) information and content to anyone who'll buy it (advertisers, scammers, spammers, the government, the media, a thief, a murderer, your mother, your boss, anyone). Putting anything on Facebook gives Facebook the right to do that forever, so don't think about changing your mind 5, 10, or 5000 years down the line. They keep everything you've ever posted.

9. Facebook Intends to be a Publicly Traded Company (as in the stock market)

Aside from the manipulative, convoluted and outright morally wrong behaviour Facebook has and continues to exhibit in the name of exploiting its users for profit. When they go public they will have a legal obligation to its shareholders to maximize profit. Everything bad about Facebook has increased in severity by a factor of 10 since I left a year ago, and will drastically increase as they move towards and begin offering their first stocks.

10. Facebook Continues to Exploit You After You Die

Usually when a person dies, their bereaved family sends proof of your death to the various websites you belonged to so that they delete your account, and/or let your family save some of the pictures and memories you stored in the cloud.

When Facebook get's someone's death certificate the first thing they do is lock the deceased person's account. So even if your husband/girlfiend/whatever knows your password and wants to delete your Facebook profile, they're blocked from logging in. Then the account is given special dead person status, so every one of the dead person's Facebook Friends now knows they're dead. In addition and perhaps most shocking, Facebook then lets any of the dead person's Facebook friends - regardless of privacy settings - comment on the dead person's wall and photos. Often your Facebook friends are not people you really know, friends of friends and complete strangers. There is no way for the grieving family to remove, edit, or otherwise hide obsene, disgusting, and offensive comments, photos, and links posted to the dead person's wall. They just have to watch as the memory of their loved one is tainted and destroyed - and public.

Facebook will keep a dead person's profile in this locked down public state for about 60 days after the last person visits the page. Because every visit is a chance for you to click on one of the diet ads on the side. So 60 days after everyone forget's about your dead loved one Facebook will take the page down because it no longer generates profit for them.

11. Facebook is You

When you use Facebook, you agree to give them equal rights to your identity and likeness. One of the sick things they do with those rights is take control of your Profile.

Recently they began perpetuating people's profiles after they delete their Facebook account. So you decide you want to leave Facebook today, you delete your account, but your friends can still invite you to events, send you friend requests and pokes, and tag you in photos. Searching for your Facebook account still turns it up - like you never left.

So deleting your profile and canceling your Facebook account doesn't actually do that, instead what you're doing is going from joint ownership and control of your Facebook account and profile, to giving Facebook complete control.

It's only a matter of time before Facebook uses your "deleted" account to carry on conversations with your friends in your name, and resurrects random historical profile data, or simply generates new information based on what you've typed in before to make it look like you're still on Facebook.

If you delete your Facebook account today, you may get a phone call next week from your friend Jenny wondering why you told her you hate her and why you posted a photoshopped image of her profile picture were you replaced her head with a cow's. You'll try explain to her that Facebook is now controlling your profile and it was them and not you, but she won't believe you and you'll have to join Facebook again just so that you can jointly control your profile with Facebook and be dragged back into the site again.

This also means that some of the people you're interacting with on Facebook - or stalking - aren't really them. It's just Facebook pretending to be them, not that such a thing makes your Facebook relationships any more hollow.

12. Facebook is Inherently Insecure

As I explained here aside from the myriad of reasons Facebook is insecure, it contains a very public (regardless of "privacy" settings) list of all your social connections, where you go, and what you do. This information is now being used by spammers and hackers to manipulate you into opening virus laden emails you normally wouldn't by posing as your friends and sending you links to viruses that can't be detected by anti-virus software that's in a social context which you trust. They're scamming people out of money, pretending to be a friend stuck in another country who just needs $900 to get home where they'll pay you back. And also as a resource for answering your secret questions. A lot of sites, including some banks and email providers, let you pick a secret question and answer in the event you forget and/or need to reset your password. One look at yourFacebook data and anyone can reset your accounts locking you out and letting them in.

13. Tech People in the Media are Leaving Facebook

The people that stand to lose the most from leaving a social network are finally pulling the plug. These are people that live in the public eye, so they're a lot more comfortable with Facebook's loose privacy, and their leaving Facebook affects their fan base who friended them on the network. About a week ago Leo Laporte deleted his Facebook account citing impossible to understand privacy settings, and the lack of ethics of the company. Leo Laporte for those who don't know is a tech god and hugely trusting, when he has a beef with something or someone it's so justified you'd have to be a turnip not to follow suit.

14. South Park

South Park and other comedy shows are starting to point out the hilarity of Facebook's TOS and "privacy" settings.

15. None of This is a Surprise

Facebook's founder and creator Mark Zuckerberg stole much of the code, and concept for Facebook from his school friends before he dropped out. They sued him and because Facebook was taking off he was able to settle out of court. He has a history of unethical behaviour, so it's no surprise his creation operates in a completely unethical malicious way.

What Do We Do Now?

First of all stop using Facebook immediately. Don't post another real status update, picture, comment, nothing.

Quite frankly unless you live in a country that enforces your rights and freedoms on the internet, of privacy, and prevents you from being obligated to unreasonable contracts you're totally and royally screwed.

If you're lucky enough to live in such a country first remove all your Facebook content and data, set all your privacy settings to the maximum privacy (to show intent in case you have to prove in court one day you wanted private) then completely delete and remove your Facebook account and profile. This is an intentionally long, confusing, misleading process and one more way Facebook has decided to abuse you. Document the process with screenshots, and email yourself the evidence so it's timestamped.

If you live in a country that doesn't care that you foolishly sold your soul to the devil, or the above doesn't work and you find your profile is still active and interacting with its Facebook friends without you, you'll need to opt for plan B.

Plan B involves keeping, or reactivating your Facebook account, making sure the only content associated with your account is about what an evil entity Facebook is, and have your "privacy" settings set to public. The best thing you can do in that situation is help create awareness and spread the word. Friend people on Facebook, and friend them with a message about why you're not able to delete your account. Start and join groups about it. Get the word out.

If enough people do this they may temporarily change their TOS to reflect a non-permanent contract which will allow you to actually delete your profile instead of just giving Facebook full control over it.

The internet is a buzz with talk of the downfall of Flash. Flash, the only web platform with 99%+ penetration rate cross platform, and 90%+ penetration rate for their latest version only 3 months after release. The platform that powers the web's content, games, and more than 75% of all interactive online media. That's now able to power desktop and mobile applications, and with the imminent release of Flash 10.1 will bring far more efficient and lower memory/ram usage. So much lighter on cpu in fact that it's able to play HD Youtube videos on mobile phones and netbooks without a problem. Yes, Flash, the downfall of Flash.

There are two main arguments to this. The first is the emergence of HTML 5. HTML 5 finally allows video and audio playback without any plugins, and canvas - a tag which allows for complex drawing, embedding fonts, etc. etc. Things Flash has been able to do for years, has a huge head start on, and does really well. Flash has supplied us with everything from video streaming to blackjack, and even website design as a whole, and yet HTML 5 is supposed to just oust the holder of the crown and sceptre when it's finalized? I don't think so. The problem nobody seems to get is that Internet Explorer still has a majority market share, by a lot depending on who you ask - and Microsoft will likely NEVER support standards because it directly counters their business model. Aside from that, and the fact that every browser that will support HTML 5(ie: everyone else), will implement it differently from each other, with different aesthetics, features, code, BUGS, etc. But even more crucial the HTML 5 spec itself is not even complete yet. It's not even finished, and it's unfinished in a deadlock between the web giants who not only can't decide or agree on which video and audio formats are the best performance wise, but also who owns the rights to implement those formats in their browser and who'll have to pay massive royalties should the true patent holders (still somewhat unknown for sure) decide to cash in. No one wants to properly look this up for a variety of reasons and so HTML 5 - supposed to bring the web together and herald a new dawn of the internet can only work if EVERYONE does in fact come together and implement it in exactly the same way; disregarding that ubiquitous HTML 5 means EVERYONE loses something, some everything.

The other main argument is the Apple iPad - just announced. Which like the iPhone doesn't support Flash. Apple uses the old "Flash is too resource intensive" argument to convince you that limiting you from the full web is a good thing. This simply isn't true. It's false. Both iPhone 3Gs and iPad could happily run the current version of Flash or Adobe AIR just like your laptop/desktop. And it's also entirely up to the developer and how they program and how resource intensive they make their flash app/widget/game/etc. The only reason, listen up, the ONLY reason Apple does not support Flash, is because the Flash platform already powers so many games and useful tools and full blown applications on the internet it threatens Apple's very business model of the Itunes/App Store. Apple wants companies to develop all their apps again specifically for the iPlatform and invest in it. If you could make a Flash app that ran on the iPhone it would also run on Android and every other smart phone. But if you invest in the iPlatform your app will only run on the iPlatform. If Apple was a monopoly the FTC would be pushing them down for their anti-competitive vindictive behaviour.

Apple doesn't block Flash support in their mobile products because they want to push innovation in HTML 5. If HTML 5 was advanced enough, or popular enough to be worth creating the caliber of applications possible on Flash, Apple would immediately configure mobile Safari to block, impede, and hinder the advancement of standards just like Microsoft with IE. In a heart beat. Apple promotes HTML 5 because they know it'll be years before it's anywhere close to where Flash is today, if ever. In fact Apple is one of the "powers that be" preventing the HTML 5 spec from being finalized in the codec wars. Apple wants you locked into their platform. Apple doesn't care about advancing the web, or a better user experience, they care about the big media companies bringing their content online through Apple's platform. Apple wants the iPad to replace your tv, radio, and other media consumption devices. They do not care about the open web.

Adobe on the other hand continues to open up the Flash platform and benefits from creating a ubiquitous platform across desktop and mobile. There are fully open source versions of their Streaming and Application servers, and free and open source ways to develop for their platform. Anyone can build a Flash application, for the browser, desktop, Windows, Mac, Linux, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc. etc. Build one application and deploy everywhere using an incredibly powerful, scalable, and mature toolset. Apple on the other hand - should you decide to invest in it, puts you in a position where you may or may not after months of development time and costs even get your application onto a device, regardless you'll have payed Apple to be a developer and to submit it in the first place or even get access to their development tools, and should you get through the random and gauntlet of barriers they can still remove your software from their platform and devices at a moments whim. They can and do literally remove your application from people's phones after being downloaded and used without warning to backup the data put into or created by your app. Anytime for any reason. AND if you're lucky enough to get your application through all these extra months of hurdles and costs and lost revenue you're only gaining access to one small subset of mobile devices.

It is absolutely ridiculous to think the HTML 5 is going anywhere anytime soon, let alone even coming close to eclipsing Flash in any way. Not from Apple, they don't want anything to compete with their platform for getting applications on their devices - Flash or otherwise(HTML, Java, Silverlight), and not from anywhere else because it's just not mature, complete, or will over the next 12-24 months be implemented uniformly or consistently across browsers or operating systems. Even in the event that somehow all these competitors come together to reduce their own profit margins and upset shareholders in the name of benefiting the user and happy popcorn rainbows, it will still only have the capabilities of Flash 8-ish. By then Flash Player 11 will be out and all the best web apps will have an Adobe AIR application front end and you'll use an Adobe AIR application to browse through a market place of Adobe AIR apps. Yes we're moving towards the cloud, and yes the cloud and desktop are becoming indistinguishable, but moving into the browser is only a temporary measure for some companies before they build a desktop front end for their service.

The iPad, iPhone, and iPod are toasters. Every person with an iMobile device also has a desktop or laptop for work and actually managing their digital life. Every single person I've seen raving for HTML 5 and the downfall of Flash depends heavily on Flash and its phenomenal capabilities. They're all idiots.

The internet is beginning to fold in onto itself, everything is integrating with everything else, and content is becoming redundantly accessible – in a good way. Rss, PubSubHubub, Wave, the Twitter Api, etc. Twitter is a great example because it's open and almost ahead of it's time in that respect. You can get Twitter data in many different formats using intermediate servers and networks, and you can use 100's of interfaces and devices not just to read content but publish and interact with your account. This is happening all over the web, from Google Wave to self hosted WordPress blogs.

Web 2.0 was about web applications escaping the page refresh model, and having customized content aggregated for and pushed to you. The next big step moving forward is going to be about collaboration amongst users, which is going to skyrocket and permeate everything – if you think of Wikipedia as a seed the tree grown from it is about to release millions of spores, think social networks and comment systems everywhere, and other new forms of user created and collaborated content; and networks and web servers are going to collaborate with each other as well to make each other's content more available and redundantly rooted in the network. The integration between online and offline will be further refined so that the mainstream notion of connection is no longer binary, but rather a matter of time and network penetration. It'll be taken for granted that when connections are possible it will be made by the application and the user will be extracted from the process of managing or thinking about the connection.

You'll post to Twitter, if Twitter is unreachable the message will be queued while the application attempts a direct connection with your Twitter followers bypassing the central network until it's back online. Or it may push the message to a 2nd server, which will queue it up to be synced when Twitter comes back online allowing you to power off your device. The same way we use graceful degradation in web design, we will adopt and apply the practice of graceful degradation to Networking.

Web 3.0 will be coloured by independent video and audio content and all that goes with it as a result of technology becoming cheaper and improving quality; and dinosaur mindset, ill-equipped organizations like the RIAA and traditional tv, news, and print networks having to open up or face a painful collapse. But the essence of Web 3.0 will be about collaborative abundance and ubiquitous-automatic-self healing-graceful degrading networks. Web 3.0 will also be about the soft walls of compatibility, language and connection dissolving.

Web 4.0 will be about hard walls dissolving. If you think of the mobile web browser as the seed – our phones, our desks, our wallpapers, the solar panels on our roofs, our cars, dishwashers, fishbowls, and house plants will be tightly integrated into the network. There are lots of products out already that do all of the above, but a mindset of the masses will need to be adopted of, "Well why shouldn't I have the time left till my dishes are ready, or the pH balance of my fish bowl accessible from my phone/laptop/bedroom/car, why shouldn't all my relevant data be pushed to me live wherever I am, and why shouldn't I be able to respond to the event using whatever interface I have handy?"

Web 5.0 will be about redundancy of the physical nodes in the network. Having an instant message conversation with your neighbour won't require a round trip to your ISP. You'll just connect directly via the networking equipment local to your devices, homes, or apartment buildings. The physical network will adopt graceful degradation. If your iPhone switching from WiFi to 3G as you walk down the street is the seed – You'll be stuck in traffic out of cell phone range and instead of having no signal as it tries to ping a tower your device will connect to a device in the car behind you etc. in a relay to the central network, or bypassing the network entirely if the destination can be reached before or without the central nervous system of the network. This kind of ad-hoc relay tech is already being worked on by Cisco and others.

The web is the backbone that will provide the content, integration, and the motive to move through these cultural and infrastructural changes. Those that say Web 2.0 is about mere gradient designs, html specifications, and tags are missing the point. The web n.0 naming convention is about cultural shifts centered around the use of the web, and the 'web' is really just an affectionate term we use for an array of networking activities as they all become integrated with each other. www is now just another subdomain of the web.