Cry havoc and let loose the apps of war!

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't eagerly awaiting the launch of Google+. I'd heard about it a month ago and ever since, I've had this feeling that Google's going to be integrating all the products it's rolled out in the past in one stroke, posing the first real threat to Facebook. While Buzz, Wave and Lively each had their flaws when deployed as a standalone application, they could find some relevance in this new avatar of social networking.

Going by the few reviews that have come out, it seems like Google+ is ahead on points because of its "refreshing" approach to online privacy - called Circles - and the video-chat add-in for conferencing.

Bernard Moon at VentureBeat had this to say:

But I realized that for many people, especially those outside of Silicon Valley, Facebook was their first and only social networking experience. These people either simply accepted all their worlds colliding, or limited their Facebook “friends” to real friends. Circles allows someone like me to group casual business acquaintances into a distinct circle where I don’t have to share personal details like family photos. It also allows for those previously uncomfortable with Facebook to potentially “let loose”.

He's right. Facebook for many years monopolized the social networking industry to the point of forcing its users to build their life around it, but with Google going the other way by being a little more flexible with its options, users now avail a choice: live around your social network, or let your social network live around you.

Here's another thing I noticed: Facebook co-owns the information I put up on it. Google+, on the other hand, has this to say on the license agreement:

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

That's more like it!

(In fact, Google's privacy policy is only some 1,000 words long against Facebook's 6,000+.)

Let's set aside the broader picture for now and focus on the little things. The thing about Facebook and Twitter that made them quickly popular was their accessibility. On Twitter, all you had to do was create an account and pick the users you wanted to follow. On Facebook, after a simple login, you could add friends and... voila! Every other tool was ready for your use.

Not so for Google+. As soon as I login, I'm told I don't have a profile. See, and I didn't know that. So I went about filling in stuff and uploading my CV and whatnot. Then, it was time for my profile picture. That's when I realized that uploading one is apparently one of the things we take for granted: while it works like magic on Twitter and Facebook, it took me 20 minutes to "get it right" on Google+. First, it wasn't a picture of me. Fair enough. I picked another one, gave it a crop and hit submit: too big. Next: "Your internet connection is too slow". Next: "Invalid image".

Having a profile picture is one of the fundamental things about social networking, and I'm not moved by Google's concern to have everyone put up "legitimate" pictures as much as I'm frustrated with the delay it poses in accessing the good stuff. This should be moved out of the way as soon as possible.

An excerpt from CNN's piece on the release:

Google+ has photo sharing, which places a large emphasis on smartphone usage. For example, photos taken from an Android phone can be automatically dumped into a private folder in the Google+ Web service, a la Apple's iCloud.

The +1 button, which was previously made available as an optional program for Google account holders, ties this all together, not unlike Facebook's "Like" button. Clicking +1 on Google search results, embedded on other sites or from within Google+ pages, allows you to share links with friends or selectively with groups of friends.

Unsurprisingly, Google has tapped its prowess in Web search for a section called Sparks. It's like Google Alerts, for receiving updates on favorite topics. Facebook's search engine is Microsoft's Bing, but users of that site can't subscribe to updates in this way.

That pretty much sums it up. The release is still in Beta and so nothing can be said about the site's dynamics when large volumes are concerned. One other thing is that Facebook and Microsoft are known to share a close relationship, and the latter's hefty acquisition of Skype a few weeks ago could mean a closer tie-in between the two to rival the video-chat advantage Google holds.

On a separate note: perhaps Facebook couldn't bear all the attention diverted away from it. Reuters got there first.

Chief Executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a visit to Facebook's Seattle office on Wednesday that the company planned to "launch something awesome" next week.

A Facebook spokesman declined to provide further details about Zuckerberg's comments.

'Nuff said.

Cry havoc and let loose the apps of war!

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't eagerly awaiting the launch of Google+. I'd heard about it a month ago and ever since, I've had this feeling that Google's going to be integrating all the products it's rolled out in the past in one stroke, posing the first real threat to Facebook. While Buzz, Wave and Lively each had their flaws when deployed as a standalone application, they could find some relevance in this new avatar of social networking.

Going by the few reviews that have come out, it seems like Google+ is ahead on points because of its "refreshing" approach to online privacy - called Circles - and the video-chat add-in for conferencing.

Bernard Moon at VentureBeat had this to say:

But I realized that for many people, especially those outside of Silicon Valley, Facebook was their first and only social networking experience. These people either simply accepted all their worlds colliding, or limited their Facebook “friends” to real friends. Circles allows someone like me to group casual business acquaintances into a distinct circle where I don’t have to share personal details like family photos. It also allows for those previously uncomfortable with Facebook to potentially “let loose”.

He's right. Facebook for many years monopolized the social networking industry to the point of forcing its users to build their life around it, but with Google going the other way by being a little more flexible with its options, users now avail a choice: live around your social network, or let your social network live around you.

Here's another thing I noticed: Facebook co-owns the information I put up on it. Google+, on the other hand, has this to say on the license agreement:

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

That's more like it!

(In fact, Google's privacy policy is only some 1,000 words long against Facebook's 6,000+.)

Let's set aside the broader picture for now and focus on the little things. The thing about Facebook and Twitter that made them quickly popular was their accessibility. On Twitter, all you had to do was create an account and pick the users you wanted to follow. On Facebook, after a simple login, you could add friends and... voila! Every other tool was ready for your use.

Not so for Google+. As soon as I login, I'm told I don't have a profile. See, and I didn't know that. So I went about filling in stuff and uploading my CV and whatnot. Then, it was time for my profile picture. That's when I realized that uploading one is apparently one of the things we take for granted: while it works like magic on Twitter and Facebook, it took me 20 minutes to "get it right" on Google+. First, it wasn't a picture of me. Fair enough. I picked another one, gave it a crop and hit submit: too big. Next: "Your internet connection is too slow". Next: "Invalid image".

Having a profile picture is one of the fundamental things about social networking, and I'm not moved by Google's concern to have everyone put up "legitimate" pictures as much as I'm frustrated with the delay it poses in accessing the good stuff. This should be moved out of the way as soon as possible.

An excerpt from CNN's piece on the release:

Google+ has photo sharing, which places a large emphasis on smartphone usage. For example, photos taken from an Android phone can be automatically dumped into a private folder in the Google+ Web service, a la Apple's iCloud.

The +1 button, which was previously made available as an optional program for Google account holders, ties this all together, not unlike Facebook's "Like" button. Clicking +1 on Google search results, embedded on other sites or from within Google+ pages, allows you to share links with friends or selectively with groups of friends.

Unsurprisingly, Google has tapped its prowess in Web search for a section called Sparks. It's like Google Alerts, for receiving updates on favorite topics. Facebook's search engine is Microsoft's Bing, but users of that site can't subscribe to updates in this way.

That pretty much sums it up. The release is still in Beta and so nothing can be said about the site's dynamics when large volumes are concerned. One other thing is that Facebook and Microsoft are known to share a close relationship, and the latter's hefty acquisition of Skype a few weeks ago could mean a closer tie-in between the two to rival the video-chat advantage Google holds.

On a separate note: perhaps Facebook couldn't bear all the attention diverted away from it. Reuters got there first.

Chief Executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a visit to Facebook's Seattle office on Wednesday that the company planned to "launch something awesome" next week.

A Facebook spokesman declined to provide further details about Zuckerberg's comments.

'Nuff said.

BSODYOUFUCKINGPUTA!

Microsoft, Inc., should be shut down simply because they continue to manufacture an operating system that fails for no particular reason right when I'm in the middle of something important. With annual investments as well as turnover in the billions of dollars, why have they not been able to eliminate any possibility of the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD)?

It doesn't help that MS Office 2007-onward has an auto-save feature: if they have to deploy something like that, they've to do it right. If the mechanism has been included for convenience's sake, then I don't want to be shown multiple copies of the file and asked which one I want to view or delete depending on the timestamp. If it has been included as a compensation against the BSOD, then the auto-save function is valuable only if it automatically saves the once every minute and not once every three minutes. With a typing speed of 75 words per minute, I lose 150 words right there.

If anything, they should just dump the auto-save functionality and focus on making an OS that's as big but not as critically inconsistent! I have always taken the romantic path to computing experience and have consciously rejected the Mac at all points of time for its oversimplification of concepts, but the BSOD is not something I'm willing to tolerate because it has a direct and frustrating impact on my work.

Many people like the OS and some can make do with the absence of a sensible design philosophy, but this algorithmic vortex is bound to lose MS some customers when, as competition builds, all that stands between one OS and the other is the BSO-fucking-D.

BSODYOUFUCKINGPUTA!

Microsoft, Inc., should be shut down simply because they continue to manufacture an operating system that fails for no particular reason right when I'm in the middle of something important. With annual investments as well as turnover in the billions of dollars, why have they not been able to eliminate any possibility of the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD)?

It doesn't help that MS Office 2007-onward has an auto-save feature: if they have to deploy something like that, they've to do it right. If the mechanism has been included for convenience's sake, then I don't want to be shown multiple copies of the file and asked which one I want to view or delete depending on the timestamp. If it has been included as a compensation against the BSOD, then the auto-save function is valuable only if it automatically saves the once every minute and not once every three minutes. With a typing speed of 75 words per minute, I lose 150 words right there.

If anything, they should just dump the auto-save functionality and focus on making an OS that's as big but not as critically inconsistent! I have always taken the romantic path to computing experience and have consciously rejected the Mac at all points of time for its oversimplification of concepts, but the BSOD is not something I'm willing to tolerate because it has a direct and frustrating impact on my work.

Many people like the OS and some can make do with the absence of a sensible design philosophy, but this algorithmic vortex is bound to lose MS some customers when, as competition builds, all that stands between one OS and the other is the BSO-fucking-D.

Font Fables

Times New Roman was my first and longest-serving font of choice. Always called back into action when the overconfident newbie fails to live up to his promises, Times New Roman takes on the challenge without the slightest of murmurs and gets things done. It can’t fly, it can’t see through walls, it can’t halt speeding trucks in their tracks. What it can do is make things happen. There is not a hint of arrogance about the apertures and the ligatures, and you can feel the humility boring into you. Times' rewards are its moments – the wilful verification of its veracity, the surrender you must enact unto it. Times speaks not much, and when it does, it does so beautifully and with commensurate elegance. Times compliments the blandiloquence of your imagery, equivocally denigrating the stunted and the deformed.

Times New Roman was born in 1932, the daughter of Plantin and the ideas of Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent. Times (the newspaper) was once criticized by Morison himself earlier in the same year, and the administration let him supervise the designing of the new font along with Lardent, who was an established typographer. The outcome of this oft-forgotten project was one of the most ubiquitous fonts of all time, a font that stayed with the Times for over 40 years. A daughter font, Georgia, is also very popular.

Over the years, with the advent of digital typography threatening to phase out Times New Roman and its cousins, people began to regard the font as a symbol of the times past: it survived hundreds of wars, two of them devastating most of Europe and Asia, plagues, climactic crescendos and devastating denouements.

[caption id="attachment_558" align="aligncenter" width="645" caption="Champion."][/caption]

There was something about it that people found hard to resist, a placid nonchalance that also sometimes disturbed the reader with an air of neutrality. Whether it was Marx, Fawkes, Stalin, Hitler, Truman or Gandhi, the speaker of the war-torn parliament that is this world was always Times New Roman: stories from all corners, about all kinds of things, quotations uttered by men from splintered political factions – all of them found no favouritism with the font. It would always be the same distance between the letters, between the words, between the sentences, between the eye that read them and the mind that interpreted them. Tell me, have you ever heard of any such thing as a Communist or a capitalist font? Although that sounds absurd, the designs imbued in the behaviour of Times New Roman answer the question without hesitation: Times New Roman is both, if not more.

Why I pay this tribute is because of two things. First, the digital age has enhanced productivity possible; a craftsman does not have to sit at his board for hours on end and design each letter. There is the computer that performs all those millions of calculations in a second, and voila! ‘A’ has been sculpted. Times itself changed its font in the 1970s because of this typographic revolution. The second reason is that Microsoft, whose Office Word has long been a close associate of Times New Roman (a relationship advertised by having it as the default font), has now introduced a new default, Calibri. Given a hundred more years, Calibri may perhaps prove its mettle. But it can never do what Times New Roman has done.

Love,

A writer.