Technology - Internet

There has been a plethora of reports of murder, blackmailing, torture and even divorces all stemming from the activity on the social network, Facebook. Sad to say the least and I really wont reminisce over all the reports earlier. At the same time I won’t single Facebook as being the only social network that is the source of all such trouble, the question is are these platforms so real in our real lives?

We all would have an obvious answer, no. Rightly said but I know people personally who value as much they value anything in their daily lives, and by taking it real I mean that they take it very seriously. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace is more of a reputation and not just a means of connection with friends, like minded or whatever you do online. These folks wont joke and would readily bite you if you do through a joke at them. Same goes for the jesters, while these two categories remain pretty harmless and can be interesting every now and then, there are more sinister folks who spy, follow and allure you into a trap. The worst part, you have no idea what is running in their heads or what they want to do, there is an absence of emotional expression, eye contact or even voice. What you have are just textual impressions of what the person might be or thinking about. Rest is up to you to decide, trust them, associate stories and make judgments or simply ignore. I guess not all are so much in control of their emotions.

This brings me to an earlier report

Facebook  is up with a bit of experimentation as the social network rolls out QR codes as part of its location features. The idea is to use these codes in line with its mobile app or more importantly as means of checking in on stores and affiliate businesses. QR is for quick responses and lately had been in test across a few select profiles but I guess it will be coming for everyone along with the location feature it plans to launch next month at the Facebook f8 conference.

The QR is primarily a bar code we often see on devices these days and can be read by a camera in your mobile phone. If I am not wrong here it appears more of FourSquare and Gowalla coming together under Facebook. The winning aspect for Facebook however is that the social network has more than 400 Million users and that is something the mentioned two networks can never reach.

The ease? Well as already mentioned once integrated / applied the same would be used for checking in to participating stores / businesses. I guess many would resort to using them and really appreciate their application. I mean these QR codes carry a lot more data than the traditional bar codes and the same can applied to almost any media, be it photos, videos, etc. Lets see how long is it before we actually see these available for all.

Google Fiber for Communities

Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make Internet access better and faster for everyone. We plan to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. Our networks will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We'll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

From now until March 26th, we're asking interested municipalities to provide us with information about their communities through a Request for information (RFI), which we'll use to determine where to build our network.

As you may know already, my 9 to 5 job is a consultant (don't laugh at the site, it's not done yet!), but what you may not know is that most of my clients are municipalities or somehow part of the government. I even work for a wonderful Mayor who is a woman. By watching the video below it seems that governments will get the first go at it and we are sending our RFI now.

This is a subsequent episode of my previous post about more powerful servers are required with the increasing needs of the Internet.

As I have been playing with the Internet in a variety of ways... i.e.

1. Checking my emails
2. Coding and designing my various websites up (hitting about 40 of them)
3. Hanging around in the social media to get more exposure with the various users on the Internet
4. Learning how to do copywriting for my websites
5. And obviously, surfing the Internet... (i.e. watching videos, reading the web, online shopping, etc)

it has become apparent to me that the Internet is the new way of using your computer.  Google has been an evangelist to educate the whole world that you don't need any other applications other than a web browser.. Well, I think it's true that most of our time, we are only opening the web browser.  Do you really open any other applications, frankly?

Well, Google has come up with this new operating system for your computer.  I don't view it as a competitor to Windows, Macintosh and any other open source operating systems such as Linux or any BSD.  That's because they only focus on the single function... That's to focus your whole computer to dedicate every single resource on the Internet.

It makes the whole browsing experience even better since you don't have to wait for your computer resources (e.g. hardware and other software) to load when you don't need them.  You don't even need to wait for 50 seconds!

Here's the deal that Google has promised... Check the video out below.

Well, if you do use computer only because of the Internet access, why not just give it a try by setting up your computer to boot up Google Chrome OS from a USB drive?

There was too much going on at SXSW for me to catch everything – I'm catching up on panels I didn't see and Peter Shankman had a great talk on self-promotion and how to do it right. Honestly this stuff is very common sense but if you've been on twitter or facebook for more than a day you know that most people still don't get it. Here are my notes from his talk.2

Self-Promotion to save the world
– by Peter Shankman @skydiver

- Get other people to WANT to do your promotion for you
- not saying how great you are, but having others want to say how great you are
- when self-promotion is done right – it's helping
- being "that guy" – the person you call when you know you're in the shit and they'll get you out of it, they've done it before without having to ask.
- Transparency: obama won off being more transparent, works for you too
- Relevancy: is what you're saying / promoting relevant to your audience?
- 2.7 seconds is attention span now – and get hit with that 16,000 times a day