What do you use Twitter for?
I remember when I first heard of Twitter, I thought it was just another new instant messaging service (think ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype etc.), joining the already crowded market of IM services. Now that Twitter is 5 years old, the full influence of the service is slowly beginning to be understood. Not many 5 year old tech companies can make a star-studded ad like that.
Now, whenever there is breaking news, my first source of information would be Twitter. Updates on traditional news sites like CNN and BBC seem to take ages, compared to the near-instantaneous speeds that information travels on Twitter. Sure, not all the information posted on Twitter is reliable but since when is that the case for any source of information? It simply means that I perk my ears up a bit more when I read the news on Twitter but I believe that only serves to improve my own critical analysis on the reliability of information I come across.
Besides keeping updated on news, I also use Twitter to follow experts in my domains of interest. Photography, web design, mobile technology, entrepreneurship…the list goes on. Now, instead of having to click through thousands of websites to look for all these information, they simply show up on my Twitter stream, helpfully shared by people who deem the information useful for others. I have probably learned more useful things spending 30 mins going through my Twitter stream than I have from a day at university.
What do you think? Am I overstating the usefulness of Twitter? If you’re not using Twitter, why are some of the reasons you don’t think it is useful?
The Future of Owner Manuals?
The Hyundai Equus is the first car that comes with an iPad as the owner’s manual. It certainly won’t be the last car to do that, but is this a sign of a trend of what owner’s manuals are going to start to look like?
Owner’s manuals have always been drab pieces of documentation written in the most boring language possible. I usually find that they seem to be thrown in almost as an afterthought for many products and come in a multitude of languages that I’ll never be able to read, making at least three quarters of the pages useless to me. And the troubleshooting section at the back of most manuals usually feature the most inane problems and solutions possible. However, owner’s manuals are usually the first thing a user of a device sees when they open the box for a product and they are also the “first line of defence” for a manufacturer when a user runs into technical problems with the device.
A user manual that is designed well can create a favourable first impression of the product and also entice the user to find out all the capabilities of the device that they might not know about from playing with the device themselves. It could also reduce the cost of providing technical support over the phone, email or in person if the included documentation covers a wide range of issues. I don’t know why companies don’t put more resources into designing their user manuals. Is it because the costs of doing so outweighs the perceived benefits?
To that end, it’s heartening to see that Hyundai is willing to try something different and put an end to the days of the boring old owner’s manual.
Zeitgeist 2010: Google’s Year in Review
Google Zeitgeist looked at how the world searched in the past year and from that data, gleaned the issues that have captured the world’s attention. From triumph and tragedy, to Youtube drivel, nothing escapes the attention of Google. This is a nice video they made of the year 2010 in review.
Writing & coding
I wrote a short post a few months ago about the similarities between writing and programming. Today, I came across an article that puts across some of my points more eloquently.
Kevin Carey on Decoding the Value of Computer Science:
Writing, in other words, is just coding by a different name. It’s like constructing a program that runs in the universal human operating system of narrative, because, as Joan Didion once said, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Authors adhere to a set of principles as structured in their own way as any computer language. Publications worth writing for insist on Galilean standards of quality and concision.
Android vs. iPhone
MG Siegler on An iPhone Lover’s (Initial) Thoughts On iPhone 4
It’s two different approaches. And that makes sense since the two have different motives. At the end of the day, Android exists so that Google can get more people searching — and keep them searching as mobile devices overtake computers. The iPhone exists to be one of the mobile devices that overtakes computers so that Apple can keep selling high-margin machines.
Shopping Spree
An engineer’s version of a shopping spree.
All these are stuff needed for a design project I’m working on in the summer. Hopefully everything works after I’m done with it!
Random thought: Programming & English
Just had a random thought while writing my previous post: my experience in programming shows up when I write English, as I try to be very careful about crossing my t’s and dotting my i’s when I write. This probably came from programming, because syntax has to be very exact or the computer will trip over your code.
However, this is somewhat unnecessary when it comes to writing English, as humans are actually very good at filling in the gaps. Maybe I can afford to be a little more careless?
Of course, if there’s too much ambiguity, different people are going to fill in the gaps differently and things start getting lost in translation.
It’s still good to be clear.
The State of Web Development
Interesting video interview of Robert Cailliau, the co-developer of the World Wide Web, on the usability of today’s devices & web applications (click on the link above if the embed doesn’t work):
He has some pretty strong views with regards to the usability of the iPhone and the state of web standards today. He argues in no uncertain terms that browsers absolutely have to follow web standards and has no business interpreting code their own way.
On the other hand, Joe Hewitt, who has been deeply involved in web development for the past decade (he worked at Netscape, AOL, Firefox, and now Facebook), argues here that web standards are evolving too slowly for any real innovation. The W3C is moving too slowly to ratify standards, therefore proprietary plug-ins and technologies have stepped in to fill the gap.
He states that proprietary tech is blowing the web away and contends that this is the reason why native mobile apps (and conversely, app stores) are doing so well nowadays.
I guess it is no surprise that the people who innovate are at odds with people who are calling for conformity, so both sides of the argument have equally valid and important points. Both sides have different roles to play in web development.
Update: Google responds to Joe Hewitt.
A Word on Passwords
As more and more services are moving onto the ‘cloud’, aka the internet, we place more reliance on our passwords to keep sensitive information away from prying eyes. Basically, passwords have become the ‘keys’ to our online life.
However, many people don’t treat their passwords in the same way that they treat their real keys. They don’t realize the importance of having strong passwords (emphasis on plural) until its too late. And even if they know they should have different passwords for different services, they figured that it’s impossible for them to remember so many passwords, so they don’t bother.
Case in point: hundreds of confidential Twitter documents were leaked after a Twitter employee’s email account was hacked into.
As the saying goes, “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link”. Here are some suggestions based on analysis of the “weak links” in the Twitter attack.
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Don’t leave passwords in your email
Many services that you sign up for online send you a registration email that usually includes your login information. If your email account ever gets compromised, your passwords for other services will be revealed to all and sundry. It can happen pretty easil. Something as simple as forgetting to log out of your email account on a public computer could get you in trouble.
You should delete those emails that contain passwords. A simple way to do that quickly is to do a search in your email using your password(s) as the search term. Delete all the emails that show up in your search results. You might be surprised at how many of those emails are lying around in your inbox.
You should have the habit of deleting registration emails as soon as you receive them.
Have a system to create unique passwords
Every web service you sign up for online should have a unique password. This ensures that even if one password is compromised, the rest of your data on other services will still remain safe. It doesn’t even have to be your fault that your password is leaked. There have been cases where a web company accidentally leaks their users passwords to the public.
It might sound pretty daunting to have a unique password for each service, but if you follow a system, it shouldn’t be much trouble.
One system that you could use is as follows:
Pick a base password of, say, 8 random alphanumeric characters. Spend some time memorizing it really well.
Next, pick 2 or 3 characters in this base password that you want to vary for each service. Replace those characters with characters derived from the web service you are using the password for. For example, you could replace 2 characters of the base password with the first and third characters of each web service i.e. For Facebook, use the characters ‘F’ and ‘c’ to replace the 2 characters in your base password.
After some practice, it shouldn’t take much effort to recall the passwords.
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Hacking and security attacks are going to be more frequent as it becomes more and more lucrative for hackers. A good guideline to follow is to treat your passwords the same way as your keys. If you don’t leave your keys lying around and use one key for everything, why would you do that with your passwords?
Nuit Blanche
Really cool short film that “explores a fleeting moment between two strangers, revealing their brief connection in a hyper real fantasy. The filming was the easy part, taking place over four days. Putting in the visual effects took the director eight months of work after that. But it seems like his efforts have paid off. Within days of posting the short film online, director Arev Manoukian started getting calls from Hollywood agents.
Wired has a pretty cool post and video, linked below, giving a glimpse into how all the visual effects were done.
via Wired.