Paul Jacobson

I am going to buy my wife her first Mac this next month and we pretty much settled on the mid-range white MacBook. It goes for about R13 000 which I am ok with. I got myself a black MacBook in October last year and the new, white MacBook is more powerful and will more than cater for her needs.

I have been thinking about a different arrangement too, though. I am running out of HDD space (my 160GB drive is just about full) and the new black MacBook comes with a 250GB HDD so I am considering buying myself a new black MacBook (around R15 000) and giving her my current one so I won’t need to spend around R2 000 to upgrade my current MacBook’s drive (that is roughly the cost of a new drive and labour to install it and move all my stuff across - I won’t even think about attempting that myself). Is it a cheek to give my wife my hand-me-down Macbook?

Speaking of new Macs, man that new iMac is gorgeous and powerful!

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macbook

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Most of the time when I talk about social media and the law I talk about the fine print and how these services are often not subject to your control and all sorts of things can happen to your pages/profiles without your consent. Most of the time I am thinking more about outages and glitches in the Matrix but there is a far more willful course of action that presents a real danger to your continued use of those services.

Facebook booted Rodrigo Shulz, an “Internet entrepreneur and business angel” who has been around the block a couple times for being a little too vigorous with the service. In a nutshell, Rodrigo is a genealogy nut and was trying to connect with members of his family tree and pass some info on to them about a group he created for a branch of the family tree. It turns out he was being a little too social and Facebook disabled his account about 73 seconds after he was warned to take it easy with all the socialising.

This morning I started adding family members again. I got a 2nd warning email today, and a disabled account email 73 seconds later. Waow… As if you read your emails immediately… Worse than a cease & desist.

This is yet another illustration of how users of these sorts of services use those services at the whim of the providers. You simply don’t have an unqualified right to use Facebook and you can expect to be kicked out or otherwise spanked if you step out of line. The message from Facebook seems pretty clear: be social, just not too social.

Oh, and this isn’t just a dig at Facebook. The next service to pull a stunt could be Google, FriendFeed or some other crowd. One way to see what your limits are is to read the fine print, as much of a pain in the butt that is. You are not in control of your profile/online presence and you need to assume your access could be taken away from you. One option is to look for a service that won’t pull a stunt like that for no good reason and without giving you a decent chance to respond meaningfully.

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facebook, rodrigo shulz, fine print, account disabled

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I finally got around to exploring this BitTorrent thing in ernest the other day and bought a copy of XTorrent to use as my BitTorrent client (yes, I know there are freebies out there and I tried Azureus out first but David Watanabe makes some great software so I went with his). The first thing I downloaded with XTorrent (and my first real BitTorrent experience) was the new version of Ubuntu for the PC (which turned out to be unnecessary when I found out Ubuntu will do the upgrade from within). The download was pretty quick and there were no real problems (probably because this version of Ubuntu was in such demand given that it was just released).

The whole BitTorrent idea appeals to me tremendously. There is obviously potential for tremendous abuse (I ran a couple searches for tv series I would like to have and found most of them on BitTorrent for (illegal) download) and I can see how enticing the prospect of loads of free stuff can be even though it is totally illegal. This side of BitTorrent has unfortunately tarnished the protocol/service and it would be great to see a lot more emphasis placed on it as a legitimate distribution channel for legitimate content like open source applications, content licensed under alternative licensing schemes like Creative Commons licenses and so on.

A related service also appeals to me tremendously. I signed up for Amazon’s S3 service a while ago because of the promise of extremely cheap file storage. I didn’t really use it except to poke around and try figure out how to use it. I finally figured out how to configure Transmit to connect to the service and upload files and since then I have been thinking about the possibilities.

I have been thinking about relaunching my Legally Content podcast and S3 would be a perfect service to use to host my episodes. I also understand that S3 supports BitTorrent (haven’t figured out how that works yet) so it would be awesome to publish my podcast both the usual way and perhaps even as a torrent feed (ok, working on this one too). I don’t know how successful a BitTorrent version of the podcast would be compared to the normal RSS alternative given that I don’t know how many subscribers will use the torrent option and my understanding that unless you have a lot of people accessing the files, the download rates will be low. I am keen to try it out though so as soon as I work out how to publish a torrent, I’ll get that set up.

As a related aside, I see that you can buy content to be downloaded via BitTorrent too. It would be great to see more commercial applications of this technology that we can use down South.

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bittorrent, amazon s3, xtorrent, podcast

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I am just watching a video interview with Steve Rubel about the information overload we face and since I am on a huge productivity kick at the moment (and yet, here I am blogging …) I thought I would share this video with you:

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productivity, steve rubel, information overload, internet, gtd, interview, brian lehrer

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Jeez, I feel like I should carry about a pack of roller towel with me when I read about Facebook Chat with all the slobber coming from the blogs raving about it. Before I continue I’ll just point out that when I think about Facebook I have a slightly queasy sensation in my stomach. I’m not sure why, maybe it is the vaguely perceptible Microsoft influence (I have been allergic to Microsoft since the OOXML debacle recently) even though I continue to build my network on Facebook and occasionally visit the site.

A number of bloggers have said that Facebook Chat isn’t meant to replace your IM services, it is “about connecting with people in realtime”. Yeah, sure, that is exactly what is supposed to happen. People are going to use their IM client, Skype and Facebook Chat … for sure … *eyes rolling*. My favourite quote from what I have read so far is from the marvellous Stii (I say this sincerely despite my generally sarcastic tone):

Now, Facebook chat raised the bar significantly. I can now connect with people in real time. I no longer have to send the messages and wait for them to respond in a couple of hours or more. I can chat to them then and there. No other social network, as far as my knowledge goes, can say that. That is quite significant! Others are bound to follow, I’m sure, as it is quite a handy feature.

So basically Facebook is coming to terms with the trend away from email and similar messaging towards IM. So now what is happening is that Facebook owns you in yet another space - IM (yes, whether you describe it as IM or chat, it doesn’t change what it is). It already has your social network and how you keep in contact with that network via more traditional messaging. So now you are going to spend even more time on Facebook chatting, messaging, posting photos and sending out vampiric zombie pirate fight club application invites. Your day is so screwed and you’ll be lucky if you have time to think about getting some work done, never mind experiencing that increasingly rare phenomenon us older fogies like to call “physical contact” or “face to face interaction”. One thing is for sure, if your company wasn’t blocking Facebook before, kiss that blue logo goodbye cause its gone baby!

So you say you are going to be using Facebook even more now? That is great, I am really happy for you. What does it all mean for me? Not much except for the fact that I will probably not be seeing my wife anytime soon … what with Scrabulous, friends’ changing profiles and now Chat. How do I explain this to my baby? How do I explain to him that he hasn’t seen his mommy because of Facebook? Damn you Facebook!!

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facebook chat, chat, facebook, im

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