Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over [ReadWriteWeb]
Zuckerberg controversial argument: "A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it." and "What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? (...) I think Facebook is just saying that because that's what it wants to be true." ponders the RWW blogger.
Mobile gesture design at Nokia – developing a new dialect of of interactions
"The field of mobile gestures is a fascinating one that Nokia is keenly exploring and researching, with explorative designers Younghee Jung and Joe Macleod on the frontline (...) As part of their fieldwork they ask people from many countries and a broad spectrum of cultures to play out scenarios of how they might perform a task with a gesture that feels natural to them, using simple plastic mono block phones as props."
Apple wants to teach us Multi-Touch gesture language [Unwired View]
"The new patent application from Cupertino, called “Gesture learning” gives a whole new meaning to gesture expansion. It describes how Apple may go about teaching you a whole new multi-touch gesture language, consisting of hundreds of words. Something like American Sign Language for touchscreens."
You Are Not a Gadget [Jaron Lanier]
Lanier: "“Here’s one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation" Although it's true that only a small % of people participate and that the quality of the contribution varies (be it a website or a workshop about the future of your neighborhood), the big difference is that on-line communities often have a wide-range of participation granularities: e.g. on Wikipedia lots of people are only fixing typos while others are entering sentences. The very existence of this "small contributor" and their co-existence with others is new, relevant and could lead to an interesting transfer to other context (w/o technology).
Many links here that comment on different digital culture things. But each one is quite interesting and meaningfull in itself: from the evolution towards a public life "by default" (instead of the contrary a couple of years ago. Rem: this idea has already been recently quoted here) to the learning of multi-touch and mobile gestures...
Earlier this week the much-anticipated Foursquare everywhere release came to fruition, making the location-based mobile game available to all regardless of their physical location. Details behind the everywhere launch and how it affected the overall game experience, however, were sparse. Until now.
Foursquare everywhere changes the check-in game as we know it. So take what you know and throw it out the window. This just got more interesting.
The City Shake Up
The whole Foursquare experience used to be centered around your city, so badges and check-ins were city-specific, and anytime you’d find yourself in another city you’d essentially need to start over from scratch. Foursquare everywhere turns that model upside down, so now you can place yourself anywhere in the world (instead of Foursquare locking you down in the nearest city).
You’ll also notice that adding new venues is now address-optional. Instead, Foursquare finally got smart: If you opt to skip the physical address entry step when you check in at a new venue, they’ll automatically attach your GPS location — as pinpointed by your mobile device — to define the venue’s location. Given how tedious it is to manually enter the address of a new place, especially with the knowledge that your GPS-enabled phone knows where you are, we find this to be the most welcome development of all.
Badges of Honor
Duplicate badges are donzo, which means gone are the days when you could earn the Newbie badge for each new city you traveled to. When it comes to badges, think of them as no longer constrained to a particular city, but worldwide badges of honor you carry with you. In fact, you can earn badges anywhere in the world and take them with you as travel. So, if you’ve unlocked the School Night badge in San Diego, there’s no need to try to stay out all night in New York (on a week night) to repeat your previous coup.
For those of you who love a challenge, Foursquare everywhere now includes a whole new set of badges for you to try to unlock. There are a total of 10 new ones (three pictured above), but we also know that even more are on the way. Since there is such an allure around unlocking mystery badges, we won’t spoil the fun, but we know that some of you at CES have managed to unlock a few of these new treasures.
Who’s on Top?
I personally play the Foursquare check-in game for the mayorships, badges and tips from friends, but some of you take rising to the top of your city’s leaderboard very seriously. If that’s you, pay close attention, because the rules have changed slightly.
With the city-lockdown lifted, Foursquare now organizes local leaderboards by your proximity to other Foursquare users. Now you’ll be ranked against everyone who has accrued points within 25 miles (40 km) of your current location. You probably won’t notice the change too much, but we think it’s a smart play and opens up the competition elements to Foursquare users on the fringe of larger playing fields.
Coming Soon
With money in the bank, Foursquare is pushing out improvements at lightning speed. In the coming weeks you can expect a spiffy new version of the iPhone app — version 1.5 — to be released in the App Store. While there won’t be tons of cosmetic changes to this update, you can expect 1.5 to be more sophisticated when it comes to locating and serving up more accurate places nearby. Eventually the iPhone app will also support more “Trending Nearby” functionality to call out hot places. We also know that the team is working on drastic UX improvements to the iPhone app, so you can expect a major redesign in the coming months.
When it comes to other mobile devices, the beta BlackBerry app is being tested by 5,000 users and Foursquare plans to push this to the public in about a week. And of course, Palm Pre users can already get their hands on that app now.
For paranoid parents everywhere, GPS trackers for kids that can trace your little darlings' every move
Xact Trax is one of several companies showing personal GPS tracking devices here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. While many of the others are focussed on outdoorsy types, it has identified a possible new market for the devices, however – worried parents
Xact Trax had three prototypes aimed at kids on their stand: the Sparki, Spotti and Robuddi. Actually, all three are just different skins for the same basic device, shown below.
Pin one on your kid’s backpack and, via PC or phone, you can track their movements, providing, supposedly, worried parents with some piece of mind. If the cunning tot decides to dump the device, the parent will be alerted (it’ll sense a lack of movement, although I guess that might happen if they leave their bag on the floor anyway). And if junior decides he/she has had enough of the kind of surveillance that would have made the Stasi blush and switches the damned thing off, mum or dad can over-ride the device and switch it back on. And there are even applications for older kids - you can place one in a car to track whether or not your loved one is driving too fast.
As yet, though, there's no function to detect crafty fags or monitor Bacardi Breezer intake
We already published here what we thought of such tools to monitor your kids (location, gps). Here's a new one. Maybe more twisted as it looks like a toy...
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”, a remark made by Thomas J. Watson of IBM in 1943. But what if the number of computing devices connected to each other would reach the number of one trillion? A short animation.
I like the sentence "people in information" and not "information in the computers" which could become our future. Another way to speak about ubiquitous computing.
Ever since Google pushed other search engines such as Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves and Alta Vista out of the water, it has become the jumping off point for any question or query known to connected man, writes Camilla Grey. A quick peek at Google‘s Year End ‘Zeitgeist’ report reveals how much the connected world relies on the service for answers to common issues. And, as the iPhone marketing has recently asserted ‘…there’s an app for that’, insinuating that whatever you need to know, learn, work out, buy and find technology and the internet can help. Great.
But something strange is happening to my brain. Yes, Google helps me work out aspect ratio conversions. Yes, Google told me that Waitrose on Holloway Road opens at 8.30am. But, the other day, when I couldn’t find my favourite pair of earrings, my instinctive response, my first move in solving the problem was to think: ‘I’ll Google where my earrings are.’
So what does this mean? It’s all very well using the internet to solve problems we can’t figure out by ourselves, but the more we use it, the fewer problems we will be able to solve. Our brains, surely, will become less adept at things we’ve always taken for granted, such as remembering names, dates, locations, spellings and sums.
Sounds scary, but evolution is scary. One minute you’re all scuttling around on four legs, huddling in caves for warmth, the next thing you know, your neighbour up the road is towering over you on two legs, warming their hands against a fire and thinking about inventing the wheel.
We’ve taken remembering things for granted because, apart from books and such, we’ve had to. But maybe, as that becomes increasingly unnecessary, think of what we will be able to do with all that extra head space! With petty problem solving and useless memories not such an issue, other parts of our brains, such as our imaginations, can develop and get better. Ray Kurzweil’s vision for The University of Singularity is precisely to harness this opportunity. As they say, ‘With the support of a broad range of leaders in academia, business and government, SU hopes to stimulate groundbreaking, disruptive thinking and solutions aimed at solving some of the planet’s most pressing challenges’. This kind of statement throws into question everything we thought about learning and academia. Even the notion of ‘knowledge’ becomes questionable and possibly irrelevant.
As a member of the generation that bridges the gap between those who grew up with the Internet and those who didn’t, the idea of Googling the location of my earrings feels unnerving. But what about the ankle-biters behind me? A colleague of mine recently watched his child attempt to work a TV using the touch action of an iPhone. The future is snapping at our heels and it’s going to be a case of change, adapt or die.
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"Free you brain, use Google"?
It's interesting because this "free head space capacity" left by the fact we don't need to remember things anymore reminds me of a conference by Michel Serres I heard a few years ago. He was saying exactly the same thing, comparing it to the time we started to use our hands for something else than to support our own weight on 4 feets. We gain an enormous potential through that single act: freeing our hands from their initial function to discover hundreds of new.
We are now freeing our brain from keeping memory of things. We can use this for something else. Make place now to imagination please!
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