My Nokia N95-3 has a deliciously fast HSDPA connection, and it is automatically recognized in Mac OS X 10.5 for syncing and tethering. Only one slight problem:
Using the developer tools and iSync Plugin Maker.app, I was able to update Barkman’s script to work in Leopard. My preliminary tests are getting ~750kbps in my apartment with so-so signal reception from AT&T. Woo! (Now if only Nokia would make a QWERTY version, so I didn’t have to carry around both this and a Blackberry…)
You can grab my updated modem script here: NokiaHSDPA.zip
Just dump it in /Library/Modem Scripts and then follow one of the many existing setup guides for either bluetooth or USB tethering, making sure to select the new HSDPA device instead of the 3G device from the Nokia category.
- I didn’t actually get it (unlike email, most IM systems have no delivery confirmation, and client/server sync issues are unfortunately quite common).
- You have a history of sending me and my team annoying queries that are a waste of our time, so I’m going to pretend the above happened and hope you figure out the “solution” on your own before messaging me a second time.
- You sent the message hours ago, when I wasn’t even online, and it was just now delivered from offline mode. If I wasn’t online to begin with, I obviously could not respond to an “instant” message, so why didn’t you just send an email?
- I’m at work, and you sent me a hyperlink that is obviously frivolous (anything with youtube.com in the URL, for example). I typically don’t have time to look at these, let alone reply with my “thoughts” on them.
Now that the cranky rant is over, I’ll try to actually be helpful. Here are some handy-dandy tips on Giving Good IM in a Workplace Environment:
- Be specific: Context is valuable. Bad: “hey did u see http://ambiguousurl.com/72d7a8f?” Good: “Hey, have you seen Bob Blowhard’s latest blog post on our product? (http://ambiguousurl.com/72d7a8f). If not, you should check it out, it has some good commentary on the XYZ feature!”
- Get to the point: If you are IM’ing because have something to ask, just ask. Don’t make “small talk” first, I’m going to be spending he entire time wondering what you’re working up to anyhow.
- Exercise good timing: If my status message says “In a meeting,” then a message like “What time are you getting out?” may be appropriate. “What are your detailed thoughts on the implications of yesterday’s reorg on our marketplace strategy for Q3?” is not.
- No reply necessary: Very uncommon, but people will love you if you do this. If you’re just passing on a piece of information and don’t need confirmation, let someone know they don’t need to reply, and save them a few seconds.
- Quick queries only: My general guideline is that anything that will require someone to think for more than two seconds in order to answer is probably not appropriate for IM.
People have strong existing workflows to handling incoming email. Filters, folders, flags, et al. allow the recipient to delegate the incoming flow of information and respond to it in a way that works best for them. Instant messages “jump the queue” people have set up, so while it can be a powerful medium for lightweight communication, be considerate of helping keep people from becoming overloaded.
Do you have any other tips for dealing with IMs? Post them in the comments, perhaps I’ll compile a list of reader contributions.
So apparently some nosey blogger finally discovered Flickr’s dirty little secret — that we’re deviously adjusting the color and sharpness of people’s photographs to make them look better. But that just scratches the surface of the sophisticated image-enhancing algorithm we use. The full details below the jump.
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I’ve always personally been fairly ambivalent about Gmail (and web-based email in general), but a new “minor” feature they rolled out (not even warranting mention in their official “What’s new” post) is absolutely brilliant.
Officially, the new feature is called Mute Thread, or “Mute” for short. Here’s how it works:
THE OLD WAY:
1) You’re reading some posts about the elections.
2) You were once excited about reading this stuff.
3) But at least one conversation is now on its 471th message. You keep hitting Archive but the damn conversation keeps popping up every time someone makes a new post!
4) You’re ready to tear out your hair. The posters’ hair. Your keyboard’s hair. Er, keys.
5) MAKE IT STOP! MAKE IT STOP, PLEEEEEASE!
THE NEW WAY:
1) You get yet another annoying message in the same damn conversation that’s already been conversed to death.
2) You press the ‘m’ key. Unless a message is written *directly* to you (e.g., your name is in the TO spot), you’ll never see that message in your inbox again!
That description courtesy of Google’s Adam Lasnik. My description would be something along the lines of “For when you can’t stop other people from beating a dead horse, at least you don’t have to watch.” For me, this small feature is the most innovative Gmail has added yet–it’s the small attention to detail that shows they are closely looking at fixing the daily problems people encounter with their social usage of email, not just big line-item “features.”
Amusingly enough, his example is the precise instance of the latest reason why I really want this feature. I’m on a medium-volume mailing list that I typically enjoy reading, but it occasionally gets obliterated by an extremely high-volume, low-value, highly-obnoxious thread. The most recent thread that did this? Yep, election discussions.
Somebody turn this into a Thunderbird extension, please!
Hack Day was a blast. Someone called us “punk rock”, which is just about the best compliment I can think of.
Heather and I co-wrote a post for Flickr Blog, so I’ll keep this one short.
I think it was somewhere around 3am, while I was making the rounds passing out free Red Bull to appreciative hackers (Leonard and I made a middle of the night run to and buy out an entire store’s inventory), that I realized how much I love working where I do.
Oh yeah, Beck rocked. (And his puppets sure like to rub some felt…)
Photos by bitmapr, stewart, laughingsquid, mroth, and flickrjo. See also interesting photos tagged “hackday06″ on Flickr.
We’ve just posted the schedule for the “workshops portion” of Open Hack Day, part of the first of our HackDay events to be open to the public.
While the rest of the schedule hasn’t been posted yet, you can be assured it’s going to be fun. Really fun. (Well, it’ll help if you’re at least a little bit nerdy… but that describes about 98% of the Bay Area population.) We’ve got some big surprises lined up, but the coolest stuff will likely be the things we don’t anticipate at all — HackDay has this way of having insanely fun stuff just emerge, ad-hoc and unplanned.
I’ll be there, along with a few other members of the Flickr team, and am very much looking forward to seeing all the interesting and novel hacks people will come up with. If you’re interested in attending, I strongly remind you to register right away, since space is going to be quite limited.
Evan Williams recently posted a much-blogged article titled Pageviews Are Obsolete. This is something Cameron and I have been arguing for at Yahoo! for a long time now, but from an almost mostly different perspective (our interest is not advertising, but social metrics for measuring the success of a site in various areas). Evan primarily talks about how AJAX-y interfaces and RSS have limited the technical ability of pageviews to be an accurate measurement — something true no doubt, but AJAX calls and RSS feed pulls can (and should) still be instrumented and measured by a competent web presence.
But pageviews aren’t just a poor technical solution to measuring engagement due to rich interfaces — they’re also a fundamentally flawed way of looking at user engagement on participatory media / social software websites. What’s the comparative value of a user who spends two hours a day on your site passively browsing various media content, versus a user who spends twenty minutes a week on the site, but spends that time uploading interesting content and/or actively commenting on other people’s work? I’d argue the second user is not only more engaged but also more valuable to the website (and their advertisers) in the long-run.
Yesterday we launched geotagging on Flickr, and while we knew it was going to be popular, the actual scale has been amazing. In the first 24 hours since launch, we’ve had over one million photos geotagged.
If you have tried out the feature yet, below is an example of what it looks like — here’s a screenshot I took last night while browsing photos taken on Alcatraz:
For me, the most exciting part of this technology — especially as a social technologist / researcher — will be seeing what new and unexpected uses the vibrant user community will produce in short order. I’m a firm believer that the users themselves will almost always come up with more interesting and compelling uses of technology than the inventors: that’s one of the philosophies that drives me to be involved in this field, and it’s always exciting to watch the new uses of a technology emerge and (sometimes) stabilize. By bringing geotagging to the masses (others did it first, but not in a mass-market way), Flickr has now become, in under 24 hours, the premiere source of data for studying how real-world people use geotagging technology.
Speaking of new and unexpected uses of technology, if you’re a hacker in the Bay Area, be sure to sign up for the first external Yahoo! HackDay / Camp. It’s sure to be a blast — come make a Flickr geo hack that will blow us away.
Update: There’s now an official FlickrBlog post about this, and the Geo APIs are released for shenanigans.
If you looked at my Flickr profile in the past few days, you may have noticed a small change I made…
Too busy to post a proper announcement! Short version that doesn’t reveal anything sensitive: I’m thrilled to be taking my areas of research expertise and applying them towards strategic operations to help shape the rapidly changing media landscape. :-)
I’ve been too lazy to make a full blog post about this, but I have to link to it sometime. I’m officially yet another degree overeducated, and have ended my career at U.C. Berkeley. You can read the “award winning” (no, really) thesis Jen and I produced on this site, but I’d recommend waiting for the version adapted for publication we’re working on.
The abstract of said thesis:
This project analyzes the social uses of computer-mediated backchannel conversation in a shared physical environment, specifically the SIMS Backchannel—a virtual communication environment actively used by graduate students at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information.
In this study, we follow seventy backchannel participants over eighteen months of persistent usage in an academic environment, during which time over a quarter-million lines of conversation occurred. We employ a mixed methods approach including statistical analysis, an opinion survey, qualitative interviews with a number of participants, and field observation. We demonstrate and describe how the users of this communication backchannel have independently developed a variety of different usages for a novel communication environment, both in-class and outside. We descriptively categorize these usages and attempt to analyze the ways in which they are both highly dependent upon—and augment—the contextual relationship of co-presence.
The project was fascinating and I’m pleased with the results we obtained. Recently though, I’ve been excited about the potential for spontaneously emerging communication backchannels via Nintendo DS. So much so I used it as an excuse to buy a DS Lite as a personal “research expense.” (For those not in the know, the Nintendo DS is the new Gameboy that contains built-in WiFi for ad-hoc gaming sessions, and ships with a built in software program for textual and drawing communication.) Lately, I’ve been pulling the DS out in public places and scanning for active Pictochat sessions—the other night I successfully found one. A friend and I were at the movies and waiting through the boring trivia and candy advertisement pre-trailers, so we decided to mess around in Pictochat instead. Shortly thereafter, a “James” joined the chatroom, and proceeded to trade a few drawings back and forth with us. I stood up and scanned the theatre, and in the back, I could see James signaling back to me by waving his DS excitedly in the air, backlight aglow.
IM transcript with an old East Coast friend who randomly met a recent West Coast friend of mine:
(23:04:07) Jeffrey Crouse: did your friend tell you how we discovered that we both knew you?
(23:04:41) M. Rothenberg: i dont think so, she just mentioned that she had met you.
(23:06:06) Jeffrey Crouse: well she had mentioned that she was from Berkeley, and i was complaining about how i missed New York and how it was so much better than Atlanta, and she said she knew some people that were always complaining about how much better NY was than anywhere else, and that one guy in particular was especially adamant about it
(23:06:29) Jeffrey Crouse: and i said “is that guy named Matthew Rothenberg?”
Well it’s true, ok?
Out of context quote of the day:
“One of the great things about my thesis is that it has AJAX.”
- Cameron Marlow
Sorry, Cam. :-)
Matthew Rothenberg is a social technologist at Yahoo!, now doing product strategy and management on the Flickr team. A New York City expatriate, he is currently slumming it in the SF Bay Area. For more info, visit