Halcyon Days

I’ve joined what I believe to be swelling ranks of Facebook users who feel the social networking site’s heyday has passed.

I think I have been in a period of denial for a few months, but can no longer ignore the stark truth — given that it stares back at me every time I log on and see my “home” page.  For a time, Facebook seemed to be serving a useful purpose, putting me back in touch with former work colleagues, current friends and high school classmates.  But then the latest redesign for the site took hold, shoveling all sorts of lists and application-based doings and pointless information about anybody and everybody on my friends list.

To wit, my complaint and reason for falling out with a site I once appreciated such a short time ago:  I really do not care what everybody’s five favorite (fill in the blank here) are, nor do I need to know what movie character you most closely match.  The same goes for whatever you are searching for or what you got points for in whatever silly game somebody has coerced you into adding to your probably overpopulated applications list.

Then there are the people who apparently see Facebook as yet another avenue to display their personal drama skills and/or utter lack of anything resembling good taste, public decorum or basic mental aptitude.  If you need to see proof on your own, look no further than one of the best examples of Internet-based cynicism I’ve ever clicked a link to:  Lamebook, the brainchild of a couple of Austin residents who are probably as bemused as I am at some of the information that finds its way onto Facebook every day.

What I do care about is occasionally chatting online with other people far away in the physical realm.  I don’t mind replying to a really interesting or witty status update.  I would like to think Facebook still has potential as a work/career/business networking tool (but why will people continue to try using it for that purpose if they have to hack their way through the jungle of application drivel?).

I really wonder about Facebook’s future and its relevance therein to its users.  In my opinion, it has become social networking’s answer to bloatware and may be on the fast track to becoming vanquished in the same sense as MySpace before it.  I still have a MySpace account but only because the site developed something of a niche identity as an online music source and I do love streaming music I enjoy.  Twitter now seems to be everybody’s favorite flavor, but somehow I doubt I’ll be Tweeting anything anytime soon.  I just don’t see the value in it for myself or anyone else.

It’s the same as what I’ve started to feel lately about Facebook.

As if it was taking a war from Tolkien and going one better, Google’s announcement that it will enter the operating system market with Chrome OS is somewhat bewildering to me, given the never-ending debate with Windows vs. Mac OS vs. Linux.

John Fontana asks several key questions in his PC Advisor article on the subject.  I heartily agree with him on a couple of points.

One, trotting out a new OS option in and of itself is not compelling enough.  A new OS is a world apart from a successful OS — as ghosts of OSes past and Microsoft’s painful lesson with Vista will show.  Two, once Google does have Chrome OS available for purchase or pre-installed on netbooks (its initial target market), it really needs to already have a few heavy hitters in the application development scene ready to roll out some game-changing apps with the OS launch.  Chrome OS as a “preferred” OS for Web apps is, again, probably not going to be enough of a deal-making aspect for most PC buyers.

With the growing high-stakes rivalry between Microsoft and Google, it’s an interesting move on the chess board by the latter, to be sure.  Whether it turns out to be a very potent move remains to be seen.

The good news for Internet Radio fans (myself included): The battle over royalty payments to song copyright holders appears to have been settled.

The bad news? Free listening might remain free only to a certain point.

The Pandora site blog has this explanation from founder Tim Westergren.  Essentially, the big webcasters will pay an amount based on either a portion of their revenue (up to 25 percent) or a per performance fee, with smaller players paying based on a percentage of revenue or expenses.

What you will find in Westergren’s blog entry about the agreement is something I expect to become the norm.  You will still be able to listen for free, but the free ride will be capped.  In Pandora’s case, it will be 40 hours per month.

I expect this to become a standard model across the board, Internet stations capping the amount of free listening time per month, beyond which you will be asked to pitch in a small access fee (in Pandora’s case, it is going to be just 99 cents) or upgrade to a paid premium service in the cases of those sites that offer such a service.

There will still be some casualties on the battlefield, especially among the smaller webcasters, some of which were totally dependent on not having to fork over a significant recurring royalties payment.  Hopefully, your favorite station will not be among those going silent.

The latest on blurring the line between human and mechanical comes to you in the form of the KOBIAN humanoid robot, a walking, interactive being that can also produce facial movement and body positioning to simulate emotional expressions.  If you have a Del Spooner-like distrust of robots, I’d advise skipping out on watching the video at the above link.

The Japanese technical team behind the robot’s creation says it hopes to develop the robot to a point where it could be useful assisting the sick or elderly with household chores, but that it would probably take several decades to get to that point.  Still, that could mean they’ve got it perfected right about the time I would need one…Exciting.

ZDNet blogger Tom Foremski has written a thought-provoking short essay on how the Internet potentially devalues the market in every industry it affects.  Being a writer and in the newspaper industry, I’m digesting a double dose of what he’s saying.  I’m not sure I concur with every point Foremski makes — I personally think the devaluation of newspaper reporters started well before the Internet age of mass media when the industry’s focus shifted to splashy graphics and “whitespace” page design — but there is no doubt of the ‘Net’s shakeup power.  Foremski gives several key examples of this in the essay. I highly recommend reading it.

A couple of very interesting announcements I’ve run across this week, both coming out of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco:

OnLive bills itself as “The Future of Video Games” with a device that essentially takes the video-on-demand (VOD) concept with movies and TV shows and applies it to video games. In this case, though, they aren’t talking about classic arcade and home console games a la Gametap (which is a good option for us “golden age” gamers) but current and upcoming new releases – titles that you would normally find for the Playstation 3, XBox 360 or Nintendo Wii.

The service, set to go live later this year, utilizes your home broadband connection to stream the games to a TV set (through a “microconsole”), PC or Mac…no discs, no long downloads, no installing to a hard drive. On the company Web site, I saw they are taking online apps for beta testers starting in the summer.

Then there is Zeebo, which is a gaming console in the traditional sense but which eschews physical game media and instead delivers the games through a 3G network, storing the software in 1GB of flash memory. The thing here is the system is targeting “emerging markets” like Brazil, Russia, India and China, according to its Web site, so I wouldn’t look for it on U.S. shelves anytime soon.

In both cases, though, it raises an interesting question if we may soon be seeing the curtains closing on the age of the disc-based home gaming console. If both of these systems really take off in their targeted markets and broadband and/or 3G networks improve and flourish, it could force the “Big Three” game console makers to give greater consideration to streaming or digital delivery on the next generation of systems.

The Associated Press has a good article today about the state of the video game industry as the Game Developer’s Conference begins in San Francisco.

If you haven’t read about it lately, video game sales have been one of the few joyous retail sectors as the nation continues sliding into an economic pit. Video game consoles, software and accessories brought in $1.47 billion in February, according to an industry analyst, and that’s up from $1.34 billion in Feburary 2008 and the $1.33 billion reported in January.

As the article points out, though, it’s not all peaches and cream as video game companies have closed studios, offices and/or laid off employees, basically joining most other industries in that regard. On the other hand, if systems continue to sell like this, new games will continue to be in demand and you would think game designers and coders might have a little easier time finding a new job.

I don’t see a video game slowdown coming anytime soon. Stay-at-home entertainment options for families are all the rage right now and probably will be for quite some time.

In the last 24 hours, I’ve seen the following online tales of how Tweets aren’t always so sweet:
http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/how-to-tweet-your-way-out-of-a-job/

http://shankman.com/be-careful-what-you-post/

http://msn.foxsports.com/nba/story/9347162/Skiles-calls-foul-on-Villanueva%27s-Twitter-habit&MSNHPHCP&GT1=39002

Plus one tech blog post questioning the point behind a political interview wearing Tweet’s clothing:

http://techblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/03/george-stephanopoulos-intervie.html

All of which only serve to remind us that for everything – even Twitter usage – there is a proper time and place.

Gigaom has a fairly condemning post about AT&T and its data network troubles handling 3G-based iPhone traffic, highlighted by the initial snags (and iPhone users’ snarls, I’m sure) at SXSW in Austin. That’s been solved, apparently, but you wonder when these wireless carriers are going to finally get the idea that a proactive stance is way better for PR and customer satisfaction than a reactive stance when it comes to bandwidth.

I don’t own an iPhone, but I must add here I haven’t been very impressed with AT&T Wireless’ regular voice/data network to this point. I was a Cingular Wireless adoptee into the AT&T network a couple of years ago and I’ve noticed far more dropped calls and inability to connect to the GPRS to shop for ringtones, graphics, etc.

If data usage is the new cash cow for wireless companies, I’d like to believe the barns will start being built to an appropriate size.

Boy, the lukewarm reviews keep rolling in on Apple’s latest little wonder, the new (and bewilderingly small) iPod Shuffle.

I have to say it’s an impressive bit of tech engineering to do a 4 GB music player in a body that’s only 1.8 inches tall and 0.3 inch thick. Being able to organize songs by playlist and including a multi-lingual voice feature that speaks music file info to you through the headphones is rather neat as well. But I’m seeing a lot of reviews so far that bemoan the absence of more intuitive controls (playlist/track selection has been moved to a button that is part of the headphones). Also, some are upset that this new Shuffle is third-party headphone unfriendly, requiring an adapter to use existing headphones.

I can forsee a more dubious problem: A $79 music player so small that it’s just asking to be lost somewhere in the house or accidentally sent through a wash cycle. No way would I be interested in buying it if I had small children or pets. And frankly, the change in the device’s controls just sounds like too steep a learning curve for a lot of people accustomed to buttons or a wheel on the body of the player.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out for Apple.

http://news.cnet.com/apple-shrinks-its-ipod-shuffle/?tag=rb_content;contentMain