Twitter Updates ToS

On Thursday Twitter updated its Terms of Service. Much has already been said about how Twitter has confirmed that you as the author own your own tweets, but I was more taken with how Twitter made the new Terms easier to read for those of us who haven't gotten a law degree. Twitter has inserted "tips" in key areas of their Terms to state their intent in plain English. Here are the tips, culled from their Terms by section:

Basic Terms

• What you say on Twitter may be viewed all around the world instantly. You are what you Tweet!
• [On advertising:] We're leaving the door open for exploration in this area but we don't have anything to announce.

Privacy

• You can opt-out of most communications from Twitter including our newsletter, new follower emails, etc. Please see the Notices tab of Settings for more.

Your Rights

• This license is you authorizing us to make your Tweets available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. But what’s yours is yours – you own your content.
• Twitter has an evolving set of rules for how API developers can interact with your content. These rules exist to enable an open ecosystem with your rights in mind.

Restrictions on Content and Use of the Services

• Twitter does not disclose personally identifying information to third parties except in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
• We encourage and permit broad re-use of Content. The Twitter API exists to enable this.

Twitter also links off to its Impersonation Policy, its Trademark Policy and its account suspension information page.

Mashable posted an article yesterday distilling many of these rules down in "10 People You Won't See on Twitter Anymore." The ten they've identified:

1. The Impersonator: using a celebrity or brand name (this led to Twitter's Verified Accounts service).
2. The Bot: tools that auto-tweet or re-tweet. This could be an issue for organizations like Ride for Roswell, that uses its @RideForRoswell account to push tweets about the event at pre-scheduled times. There are many accounts that may now fall under suspicion when it may not be warranted (like @cr_wookie, which is too fun to kill).
3. The Naked Chick: profile photos and/or backgrounds that are clearly pr0n.
4. The Serial Abuser: multiple accounts, constant follow/unfollow behavior, lots of @replies (unsolicited or duplicates) are some of the behaviors that will trigger this.
5. The Squatter: think domain name squatters and you get the gist.
6. The Slimy Salesman: a little less specific, but as users we know them when we see them. Twitter says aggressive tactics and follower churn will get you flagged.
7. The Hashtag Spammer: using a hashtag to ride the wave of a trending topic when your post has nothing to do with it.
8. The Plagiarizer: retweeting sans attribution. Use your RTs people!
9. The Über Oversharer or Bully: Twitter bans direct threats of violence. I'm pretty confident that they mean real life violence.
10. The Faker: If you try to integrate the Twitter Verified Account badge into your profile photo or background, you're out.

The Point?

Twitter is doing two key things here: 1. Giving subscribers confidence that they understand copyright and fair use concerns (especially after the Facebook fracas) and 2. demonstrating that they are reacting to spammers. So far reaction has been positive for both, but I'm particularly curious to see how Twitter can keep on top of all the spammage when they don't have an army of staff to monitor the service. In Internet time, we should know in a few weeks.

Read More

Facebook Stalks Twitter

It's been a busy day over at Facebook HQ. They have announced three new features/applications that are either influenced directly by Twitter or can be viewed as direct competitors to features of Twitter.

@Replies in Status Updates

A compelling feature of Twitter is the ability to either respond directly to another Twit by leading your tweet with an '@' and Twitter account name, or reference another twit by including the @username anywhere in the tweet. If someone puts @aardrian in his/her tweet, I am notified in some fashion (some third-party applications handle it differently depending on your preferences)

Facebook launched a similar, but different, feature today and will be rolling it out over coming weeks.

The gist is this: Start a status update and begin to reference a friend by typing an '@.' A menu will appear at that point allowing you to select one of your Facebook friends (or groups/events/apps/pages). The '@' goes away once you select someone, but that name remains a link to the person's profile. The person you referenced will be notified via email and/or a wall post that he/she was mentioned in your update.

Facebook Lite

Launched but not widely available, Facebook Lite is a stripped down version of your Facebook friend feed. The idea was to create a simpler interface that focuses on the updates from your friends. The speculation is that it's intended to mimic the Twitter feed, but with the uniquely Facebook features. Mashable has screen captures in their article, "BREAKING: Facebook Lite Is Live."

Facebook Pushes FriendFeed Open Source

A month ago Facebook aquired FriendFeed and called many of its aggregation features its own as a result. Today Facebook is releasing the web framework that powers the real-time functionality of FriendFeed as an open source tool called Tornado. Organizations that are looking for a framework designed to focus specifically on speed and performance for real-time data throughput have another option that has already been stress-tested as a Facebook add-on and stand-alone application.

Read more:

• http://www.tornadoweb.org/, The Tornado web site.
• Tornado: Facebook's Real-Time Web Framework for Python over at the Facebook developer blog.
• The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed's web server over at Facebook’s Director of Products, Bret Taylor, personal blog.

Read More

Ning Apps Launch

Ning has announced today on their blog that Ning Apps have launched.

We use the Ning platform to run the Ride for Roswell community site (RideConnect) and for the QuantumCMS forum (QuantumCMS is Algonquin Studios' web content management system, for which I am responsible, so go sign up with us). Having access to 90+ applications should prove useful to these sites. Sadly, I can't offer much commentary on them since they just launched today. The complete list of Ning Apps is available at the Ning Apps Directory.

Ning has set up a sample site for the apps at ningapps.ning.com so users can try them out.

Read More

Facebook Doesn't Make You Smarter, Rigorous Research Does.

Yesterday Mashable.com posted an article titled "Psychologist: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber." It was originally from an article in the Telegraph titled "Facebook 'enhances intelligence' but Twitter 'diminishes it', claims psychologist." This morning I heard the story referenced on a couple morning news programs and I've seen it picked up on other news sites and blogs. It was also Mashable's most re-tweeted article yesterday.

The psychologist, Dr. Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling in Scotland, studies working memory, one aspect of IQ tests. She developed a working memory training program to increase the performance of "slow-learning" 11-14 year old children. Her program increased IQ, literacy and numeracy tests by about 10 points after eight weeks.

None of the articles say that her training program used Facebook. The closest thing to a quote making this assertion from the Telegraph article says that Dr. Alloway believes that strategy video games may train working memory:

"Video games that involve planning and strategy, such as those from the Total War series, may also train working memory, Dr Alloway believes."

None of the quotes in the article, or on the other articles across the web, or in any of the news stories I can find actually have her say that Facebook makes you smarter or that Twitter makes you dumber.

Her argument against twitter, from the Telegraph article:

But the ''instant'' nature of texting, Twitter and YouTube was not healthy for working memory. ''On Twitter you receive an endless stream of information, but it's also very succinct,'' said Dr Alloway. ''You don't have to process that information. Your attention span is being reduced and you're not engaging your brain and improving nerve connections."

Again, this isn't cited as part of a study or her program. While that doesn't mean she isn't right, if it's not from a study then it doesn't have the rigorous scientific method behind it to validate it. A correspondent from Times Online was at the British Science Festival where Dr. Alloway reported on her program. He provided the following transcript from a recording he made as part of the article, Does Twitter really damage your memory?:

Journalist: Has anybody actually studied whether Facebook or Twitter affects memory?

Alloway: Not that I know of.

Journalist: So there's no published evidence?

Alloway: There's no published evidence, it's just a hypothesis, I'll be starting a research project in January.

Her assertions don't take into account how everyone uses those outlets. Do you spend your time on YouTube watching College Humor pranks, or perhaps watching the Sixty Symbols channel? When you are using Twitter, are you just passing by, or engaging in a dialog with friends, or perhaps using it just as a broadcast information resource, perhaps by following JPL's Asteroid Watch? I would argue that those are resources that might, just might, help make you smarter, or at least hold off the dumb tide.

I believe students at the age she is studying are very tied up in the social aspects of their lives -- who likes them, what clothes to wear, where is everyone going, etc, even if it's not a conscious decision. They have a drive to learn and discover that information and Facebook is that vehicle. Years of research point to passion being the driving force behind developing expertise in something and I suspect that the passion for the social outlet is enough for the children to gravitate to, and perfect the art of, using Facebook. Video games have a similar draw for children. If people are doing something about which they are passionate, and they develop that expertise, doesn't it stand to reason that as part of that process they develop their working memory?

I use the article "The Expert Mind" from Scientific American (August 2006) as the buttress for my argument. It doesn't make me right, but at least I'm not buying into the headline that everyone else has. If I am wrong, perhaps my Facebook use and my Twitter use will cancel each other out.

Additional: One example of how Facebook may actually make you dumber: Trapped Girls Updated Facebook Status Instead of Calling For Help. Srsly?

Read More

Google Chrome Turns 1

The Google Chrome blog has announced today that Chrome has officially turned 1 year old. In the regular world of software development, that might not be too long, but Google is quick to point out what they have done in just 1 year (I left their links intact):

• 51 developer releases, 21 beta releases or updates, and 15 stable releases or updates
  
• Over 20,600 bugs filed (4367 of them were duplicates, 3505 have been fixed, which leaves a whole lot left to go!)
  
• 11 external committers and bug editors, 46 external code contributors
  
• 50 Chrome Experiments
  
• 26 posts on the Google Chrome blog
  
• 12 Chrome Shorts, a collection of short films about Google Chrome
  
• A sequel to the comic in Japanese

I'm not so sure the items after the first bullet are really accomplishments (I hope to add more posts than that to this blog within the next year), but they certainly take pride in them. If you head over to their post, you can follow links to photos and videos of Google Chrome cake.

Other (perhaps more relevant) notes from their blog:

More importantly, we've improved by over 150% on Javascript performance since our initial beta. [...] We've also added some of the most commonly requested features -- including form autofill, side-by-side view, the ability to remove items from the New Tab page, and full screen mode (just hit F11!) -- and even a bit of magic to make the entire web three-dimensional (okay, that was just a joke).

Mashable has a new post about this same story that also discusses the Chrome market share. Mashable points out stats that show Chrome at 2.84% while Internet Explorer retains 66.87% and Firefox holds on to 22.98% of the market. Chrome beats Opera, but not by much. Opera is at 2.04%.

Let's see how that Google/Sony deal helps Chrome out over the next 12 months.

Read More

Google Chrome Pre-Installed on Sony PCs

Google cut a deal with Sony's PC division to distribute Chrome as a pre-installed browser on their Vaio PCs. Google claims to be in talks with other computer makers. Google has supposedly discussed distributing Chrome with RealPlayer and is also talking about TV commercials.

It looks like Google might be making a concerted push to start to gain some greater traction on end-users' computers. After all, when the bulk of your applications are distributed over the web, isn't it a good idea to control the platform, too? Chrome has ~30 million users (according to Google), which is only about 2% of the market.

Reported last night at Financial Times. Read the full article.

Read More

Opera 10 Released

Opera 10, the web browser of the niche user, has been released today (on schedule). Among the new features is something called Turbo, which "uses compression technology that provides significant improvements in browsing speeds over limited-bandwidth connections." I guess this means I should try it at the cafe on those weekend mornings when the regulars are downloading multi-gig videos.

Opera supposedly has a new look and sleeker interface. If I can get it installed today I'll update this post.

The part that interests me most, their claim of a "40% faster engine and cutting-edge Web standards support."

We optimized the new Opera Presto 2.2 engine in Opera 10 to be much faster on resource-intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook. In addition, with an Acid3 100/100 score, Web Fonts support, RGBA/HSLA color and SVG improvements, Opera 10 is ready for the next generation of Web applications.

Download it at Opera.com.

Read More