Mea Vita: Carpe Diem

Today, I ran across an article pointing out that Google is storing your searches and queries, including your voice to text dictation data.

I forgot that, many years ago, I had turned off all of these features, so Google doesn't report to me any history of my activity on any of their websites. But, I surprised some friends when I showed them how Google was storing their info. It is relatively easy to see what personal data they're recording. Simply visit the following webpage when you're logged into one of your Google accounts:
https://history.google.com

All clear - there's nothing to see here.

The following link will take you, step by step, through a Google privacy checkup where you can tell them what personal data you want them to record:
https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup

Hard copy print out of the Internet with yesterday's news.

As companies grow, seemingly small changes become difficult. Change is even more difficult when companies have been around for a long time. Most companies think in terms of what they do rather than focusing on the benefits they provide. It's hard for many companies to recognize they could be left behind when technology changes. The classic example is the ice trade of the 1800s. More recently, we saw it in the newspaper industry over the past decade.

One clear example of this is SMS. It is a shrinking technology. Since 2005, the cost of sending a single text message rose steadily from 5¢ to 25¢ over the next few years. This falls under category #3 of the The Good, The Great, and The Bad Business Models.
Rarely do people send SMS text messages through their computer. It would be a simple feature, but the carriers didn't implement it. Other companies have stepped in because the wireless carries didn't innovate SMS. It was Grand Central that brought texting via computer to the masses. Apple has taken this one step further with Messages. Messages strongly encrypts the content and deliveries it to multiple devices at the same time at no cost.

The markets are bigger than any one person or company. A company can fight change by controlling or cornering the market, but that won't last forever in high tech. The companies that tend to fight it and succeed for long stretches of time tend to be oligopolies (Think: Big, as in Big Media, etc). It lasts for a while, but what companies truly last for centuries?

What's the difference between blocking a phone number with Google Voice compared to blocking with iOS 7?

For the recipient, there's really no difference since their phone won't receive calls, voicemails, or text messages. But, for the caller, it's a slightly different experience between the two platforms.

Calls blocked with Google Voice will receive a message that the number is no longer in service.

Calls blocked with iOS 7 ring for the caller (not the recipient) and then the voicemail (or text message) just disappears (update: actually, the voicemail goes into a Blocked Calls folder on the recipient's iPhone). To the sender, it appears they were delivered.

Grace Hopper: Creator of the first compiler.

I can't think of many technologies that need to be saved for technology's sake. Saving a technology for historical purposes is a different thing. But that's not the current debate when it comes to RSS and Google's announcement, this past week, to retire Google Reader. Don't forget that Apple had previously retired RSS, last summer, when the company removed its RSS reader feature from Safari which is something I dearly miss.

In the computer science world the debate about giving up one technology for a newer one has been ongoing for decades. It probably began when Grace Hopper started organizing code algorithms into the first compiler. There was a lot of push back about running inefficiently compiled code on computers, in the 1950s, when the best practice was to write lean machine or assembly code. Nowadays, who would write a commercial consumer GUI app in assembly language other than Steve Gibson? Sure, no language is smaller and faster than assembly, but it just requires too many programmer brain cycles to code. As I mentioned last month, a good chunk of coding is debugging; and code that you don't have to write is code that you don't have to debug. But shifting from one technological process to another (whether it's a protocol or a language, etc) will always be met with criticism. People will resist the change and sometimes it's for good reasons; usually due to a deep investment in the technology.

The simple fact is that new technologies advance to either replace shortfalls in older technologies or bring new features. Let's not forget how RSS lead to podcasting. If you think of technology as anything that was invented after you were born, then, if you wait long enough, any technology that doesn't evolve into something new will no longer be technology.

The Future
RSS began as a consumer facing format. But, as I pointed out earlier this week, older technologies are breathed new life when wrapped with a web front end. That's effectively what Twitter did to RSS. Granted, Twitter is a centralized platform, but it's definitely become more popular than RSS. That might be because it's a push format (as opposed to RSS's polling process) or it might be because consumers can easily see all of their feeds on one website or Twitter client. Regardless of the reasons, there's no denying that Twitter has been in the news much more than RSS these past few years.

The beauty of computer science and software engineering is that it's very easy to build on previous things. More so than in the real world. Flipboard has taken the basic list format of Twitter and RSS one step further as it presents it in a newspaper format. Newspapers printed on paper may be dying as a medium, but it's still a great format to read and discover news since unrelated articles are cleanly presented on a single page.

What seems obvious to me is that RSS will not go away; instead, it will (and already is) being built upon. In the near future, it will no longer be a consumer facing technology anymore than DOS or a Unix shell is today, but RSS will be the glue to tie together publisher and consumer. Could you seriously see a completely different feed standard being developed in the near future, from scratch? Baby steps to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Dots
Last week, I discovered an interesting Gmail trick that allows you to place a dot (.) anywhere in a Gmail e-mail address (before the @). In other words, e-mails sent to the following e-mail addresses will all be received in the same account:
joemoreno@gmail.com
joe.moreno@gmail.com
j.o.e.moreno@gmail.com

Pluses
There's an older trick that many Gmail users know about which is to place a plus sign (+) after your Gmail username and before the @. It's a perfect solution when you sign up for a service and you're worried about the company spamming you. With the +CompanyName@ it's easy to filter out specific e-mails. E-mails send to the following addresses all end up in the same account.
joemoreno+Walmart@gmail.com
joemoreno+Geico@gmail.com
joemoreno+Meetup@gmail.com

The dots trick doesn't work for your e-mail addresses that use Google Apps for hosting e-mail (i.e. johndoe@example.com). It only works with e-mail addresses that end with @gmail.com.

But, the pluses trick does work with Google Apps accounts as well with Apple e-mail addresses ending in @mac.com, @me.com, and @icloud.com.

The best part is that this behavior works right out of the box – there's nothing to configure with Gmail or Apple.

For years, I had been using Safari's RSS reader since that was my primary web browser. At least that was true until this past summer when Apple removed RSS from Safari. I was on vacation at the time so I only took a quick cursory look around the Mac App Store for a replacement. The best option that I found was Cappuccino, but it really didn't answer the mail for me.

Since then, I took a look at RSS readers but none were as convenient for me as Safari's native RSS functionality. Firefox has a built-in reader and Google Reader is quite popular, but each requires the extra step of opening a different app or visiting a website. Changing my habits, after years of getting news the same way, is going to take a little work.

Without explicitly realizing it I found that I was now getting all of my news updates via Flipboard on my iPad. Flipboard is nice in that you can point it at websites, Twitter, or RSS feeds using its search feed. The other beauty of Flipboard is that it presents news more like a newspaper or magazine rather than in a list format like most RSS readers. The downside is that Flipboard only runs on my iOS devices, so I still didn't have an desktop solution.

So, now I'm wondering if this will be the progressive evolution of RSS? In the same way that most programmers no longer code in machine language or assembly, will RSS evolve primarily into a middleware layer, that's still important like a CPU's registers, instead of a feature designed for the average end-useing consumer?

It seems that there is no shortage of search engines combing tweets for links. Whenever a tweet is sent, that contains a link, within a few seconds search engines start to spider the tweet. In the first two minutes each link in a tweet has been hit by a bot 12-20 times.

Here are the first ten hits on a link within three seconds:

Click to enlarge

Click for the full size graphic.

Infographic by PPC Blog