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Category: Tools and Technology

Mini Rant About Gtalk’s Idle Status

Published by Iris on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Part of the reason I love IM and dislike the phone is that I have a better chance of telling if the person on the other end is interruptable before I interrupt them when we’re talking via IM. Phones don’t have statuses, so I get shy.

Most the time IM statuses make sense. People are either available or away. It’s not rocket science. But Google just had to mess with a good thing and use an “Idle” status that every other chat client I’ve used interprets as “Away.” Not only that, but if you were once available but haven’t done anything for a couple of minutes, it sets you to Idle. If you were once busy but haven’t done anything for a while, it sets you to Idle. Both look exactly the same, and both look like you’re “Away” from any other chat client. This means that I now have no clue if you’re available, and that the only ways I might have a chance at guessing are if I remember that you tend to use Google Talk through the Gmail page or the Gtalk client or if you add clarifying text to your status.

Dear Google, if you’re going to do Idle statuses, you should really stick to something that means “I used to be available but I haven’t chatted in a while,” and this should not look like an Away status to every other client out there. If people were Away and have been for a long time, chances are they’re still Away, so switching to Idle doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If it makes a difference, though, you could have another status that means “I used to be away but I haven’t checked in for a while.” This way we’re return to a land of less confusion.

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Minor Tweaks and Major Reminders

Published by Iris on Saturday, February 21st, 2009

This past week, Dorothea sent a link to FriendFeed on the art of writing and designing for readers. It’s called In Defense of Readers, and it’s one of those pieces of writing that pulls me in, engrosses me completely, makes time stand still, and then leaves me thinking about it for days afterward. I loved everything about it, but two very different things keep coming back to me as I cook dinner, walk across campus, or drive through town. I want to make sure this space reflects those principles to the best of my ability, and I loved the reminder that the best writing assumes the best of its readers.

The blog template portion of my reflections probably isn’t very interesting. Little by little I’m tweaking small things like line spacing, distribution of white space, and figuring out how to keep the sidebar from competing for eye-time with the body text. (Just as a side note, I’ve realized that for the kind of writing I do, the sidebar and the navigational function it represents isn’t the most important piece of the site, and therefore shouldn’t have the coveted left side.) I know just enough CSS to mess up a good template, and I use it so rarely that every time I do, I have to relearn it. But little by little I’m tweaking the site to allow for easier reading. And this challenge is enough fun that I’m ignoring the little voice in my head that screams, “But everyone’s reading this in their feed readers anyway! Who cares what the site looks like!!”

The article’s respect for the reader, though, has much farther reaching implications. It stretches into the far corners of my experience to touch everything from interpersonal relations to prose. For example, my co-workers and I were talking over dinner about how the best managers are those that assume that their employees have good intentions and want to do well. This assumption helps them approach difficult situations in constructive ways, and goes a long way toward helping employees to actually do well. I realized that this was analogous to the epiphany I had in graduate school when I realized that the best articles and essays assumed that those who did or would disagree with them had arrived at their conclusions in perfectly reasonable ways. Up until that point, I’d thought the best “argue against those who disagree with you” portions of my papers should be point by point deconstructions of my opponent’s arguments with the goal of showing how much smarter I was than they were. But as it turns out, in the real world this just makes people think you’re arrogant and a bit of a rhetorical show-off.

No, what I like about Mandy Brown’s writing is that she didn’t take the easy attacks on either side of the debate about reading online vs reading in glorious everyone-knows-this-is-aesthetically-more-pleasing print. Her writing could be appreciated by those who think books are the only way to go and those who rarely curl up with anything other than a laptop. It embodied the kind of attitude toward potentially disagreeing readers that I’ve always hoped I could pull off, if I tried very hard. And by pulling this off, Brown’s writing was not only “In Defense of Readers,” but it also defended its readers from the gratuitous barbs that might have prevented them from hearing her underlying arguments.

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Facebook’s Devilish Contract

Published by Iris on Monday, February 16th, 2009

News of changes to Facebook’s Terms of Service hit FriendFeed yesterday and sparked several debates amongst the relatively small set of librarians I follow. Facebook has always claimed ownership of everything you post there, but now there are two new lines that have caused the buzz:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

And:

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

In other words, they own everything, forever, even if you delete your account.

The reactions to these changes tended to fall into one of four categories:

  • I’m deleting everything today!
  • It’s not so bad if you’re using Facebook in the way it intends you to use it.
  • Privacy is Dead, get over it.
  • If you don’t like it, don’t use Facebook.

I don’t know what reaction I was hoping for, but these weren’t it. Here’s why:

  • Deleting everything today won’t solve anything. They’re caching this stuff, remember, and they’ve already laid claim to the cache.
  • Telling me that some categories of content are wrong to post because I’m not using Facebook for the kinds of things it was made for also seems a little facile. Social networking sites really can’t dictate the sort of social networking that happens on them. That’s defined by each individual network. Part of what has always made Facebook complicated is that any individual person might be using their profiles for personal and professional purposes simultaneously. (They may not do this well, but there’s no good way to prohibit one or the other of these uses.)
  • And privacy may be dead, but that doesn’t mean that we should throw our content willy-nilly into the hands of people who want to use it for commercial purposes if we can help it. There should be an opt-out option.
  • And while it’s usually a perfectly fine response to say “if you don’t like the contract, don’t sign it,” this response isn’t actually very helpful in this case. First of all, it’s too big of a network right now, and is often the only way of staying in contact with whole groups of your acquaintances. Goodness knows I’ve tried to leave several times (it’s just too complicated, too big, and too much for me), but I then realized that this would be tantamount to putting myself into a social time out chair. Unfortunately, we’ve been put in a position where protest might hurt the individual more than the institution. Also, it’s too late to protest if you already have a profile. They already own your stuff.

So what would be a good response? Well, I’m not exactly sure (boy was I hoping somebody could have articulated it for me!). Living online is a constant process of figuring out which pieces of yourself you’re willing to leave for others to use, though, so we always have to be aware of what we’re giving up and then use that knowledge to help us decide what to share in any given space. So in the case of Facebook, I’m willing to give them my status updates, wall posts, profile pictures, and the contact info that is already findable elsewhere online. And that’s about it. I’ve stopped feeding this blog into my profile there because I’d prefer they don’t have this content from now on.

This rather pragmatic response doesn’t diminish my righteous indignation toward Facebook, though. I’d love it if they got their tyrannical Terms fed to them in a goopy mash by a horde of gleeful lawyers. And I’m unwilling to say we should just get over it and move on. I guess what I am saying is that this is a perfect reminder for me that I am always giving up pieces of myself to The Internet, and that I should step back and think for a minute about what I’m doing on Facebook, why I’m doing it, and how many pieces of myself I’m willing to pay for the privilege of staying out of the social time out chair.

[Update 2/18: Facebook has heard the hue and cry and has reverted to its old TOS. I wonder what the new version will look like once they’ve taken all the comments in. Also, I found this fascinating comparison between the draconian TOS and those of other social sites.]

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The Obama Drama that Interests Me The Most

Published by Iris on Saturday, February 7th, 2009

I have no idea how to fix the current economic crisis, create peace in the Middle East, or make sure everyone gets health insurance. I listen to the news pretty passively, hoping that the Powers That Be make good decisions on my behalf, since there’s no way I’d be able to make these decisions with any confidence of success. So while events of great magnitude wash over me day in and day out, what sticks? What do I go back to at the end of the day and ask Google for updates that I may have missed? Obama’s Blackberry.

It had never occurred to me that he wouldn’t be able to use one while off being president. It seemed like the perfect accessory to a presidential suit. Who knew that it would have such security ramifications? Who knew that it would spark debate about the kinds of filtered information top leaders get, and what this will mean for historians of the future? Fascinating!!

As long as he doesn’t do what one rather thoughtless congressman did, I’m thrilled that he’s got a new spy-proof Blackberry (or, as I like to think about it, the First Crackberry).

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