The Problem with Private-Sector “Free” Services (or, WTF Happened to Google Reader?)

Posted on March 20, 2013 by wellsdc

Google is shutting down its Google Reader service on July 1, 2013, I recently learned. I have used Google Reader for all my RSS feeds for over a year, and have liked it far more than any other similar service that I have used. It works particularly well with an iPad app called Flipboard, which arranges posts in a style reminiscent of a newspaper. Apparently, Flipboard will allow its users to transfer Google Reader subscriptions directly to its service, to the gratitude of many users. I’m pretty sure Flipboard did not have to do that, just like Google does not have any obligation to keep Reader going. The reason for that is that I, and as far as I know everyone else in the world, do not pay for the Reader service, or for Flipboard.

As my friend Kevin said (or quoted), if you are not paying for a service that you are receiving, you are not the customer. You are the product.

Google has no obligation to continue offering a service that does not make it money, even if everyone loves it. Google makes money from its online services by selling advertising, just like nearly every other internet service that does not charge a fee directly to users. You, the user, are the recipient of that advertising. Google’s revenue is based on how it can monetize your online behavior. The company has an interest in keeping users happy, because it needs us to keep coming back to the site, or any other site plugged into Google (which is probably most of the world’s websites by now.) Its bigger concern, though, is keeping those advertising bucks coming in and keeping costs low. If a service costs enough that it impacts the acceptable profit margin, it goes. If you are not a Google shareholder or an actual customer, you ultimately have zero clout in influencing the decision to discontinue a service.

Google Reader is not an essential service for me, but rather a convenience. My life will not suffer for a lack of centralized RSS feeds in a handy newspaper-style format. At worst, I’ll have to get used to a different way of reading the news/blogs. The convenience offered by Google Reader/Flipboard is not something so important that I think it should be a public service. I do think that other services that benefit the public much more directly need to remain public, for the very reason that public service, not profit, should be the primary motivator. Prisons come to mind. So do roads and sewer mains.

I would consider paying something for a service like Google Reader. Maybe no one else would anymore. Maybe that is the problem.

Photo credit: svilen001 on stock.xchng.

SXSW 2013 Diary, Day 2 (March 9, 2013)

Posted on March 11, 2013 by wellsdc

[Typed on an iPad with minimal proofreading.] Since it was a Saturday, I could use my fiancee’s parking pass downtown. No bus for me!

I almost immediately regretted trying to drive downtown. I got one of the last parking spaces on the roof of the garage, which I only obtained after a lengthy process of abruptly stopping to avoid rear-ending the driversnwho seem to think that you must close every 10-foot gap between you and the car in front of you at 20 mph or more.

Te first session I attended was entitled Tweets from the DMZ: Social Media in North Korea with Jean H. Lee, AP Bureau Chief for North Korea. While there was some interesting “slice of life” information about a Seoul-based journalist’s regular trips to North Korea, it mostly consisted, quite literally, of screenshots of tweets she has sent. I learned some interesting stuff, though. She said that the regime never stops her from taking pictures, but they always know what she is doing. They try to make sure she is “respectful” to her subjects more than almost anything else. South Korea has very strict limits on access to online material from the north. It is apparently illegal in South Korea to access North Korean websites, and the government has a strict firewall in place. It is illegal even to retweet something from North Korea. People in South Korea, she said, must be careful even following people in North Korea. North Korea has a few government-run sites, including Flickr, Twitter, and Instagram. The main goals of these government-run social media sites are propaganda, getting pictures of the leader out, etc. One person, during questions, basically suggested that she was a dupe of Pyongyang, doing their bidding by presenting their side of things, but she disputed this. He even suggested that North Korean agents might be in the room keeping eyes on her. She responding by inviting any North Koreans in the room to stand up and say hello. No one did, and I decided that would be a good time to leave.

Last year, I met some interesting people in the Samsung Blogger’s Lounge, so I headed there next. Let me try to be charitable here……while I recall that they used the room last year both to give bloggers a place to work and socialize and to do webcasts of interviews with people who are “buzzing” at SXSW, this year the interviews were harder to ignore. Impossible to ignore, actually. The host of these interviews is probably a very nice person, but her style is, I dare say, not suited to any room where anyone is expected to pay attention to anyone except her. She’s bubbly, goofy, and loud, is all I’m saying. I was able to finish my Day 1 blog entry, but couldn’t hold a conversation with anyone for long.

I hesitated to attend the next panel, for pretty basic social reasons of taboo and embarrassment. I’m glad I did, because it was one of the best sessions I’ve attended at any conference, ever. Not just because the presenter, Cindy Gallop, has an awesome British accent. The session was entitled The Future of Porn, and the line to get in extended out of the ballroom quite a long way. (She noted that nearly everything she was going to say in her talk could be a double entendre, andit was good to get that out of the way.) This was not a discussion of smut per se. In fact, she maintains that the sites she created, MakeLoveNotPorn.com and MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, are not porn, but “real world sex.” I’m just going to paste some things from my notes (shout-out to Evernote here):

What happens when you combine easy access to porn online with societal reluctance to discuss sex at all?
MakeLoveNotPorn compares porn world to real world. Led to TED Talk in 2009.
Not anti-porn. Issue is lack of honest conversation about sex in the real world.
Social media platforms generally won’t deal with sex. She wants to “socialize sex.” Launched MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, where people can submit their own videos of real sex. Site is curated, so it’s not like YouPorn. $5 submission/curation fee, $5 rental fee for 3 weeks unlimited viewing, 50% of revenue shared with submitters. The “Etsy of Sexy.”
Not porn, not “amateur.” They are #realworldsex. Community tells them what real world sex is.
Real world sex is funny, while porn sex is “earnest.” Sexual equivalent of “America’s Funniest Home Videos”
Real world sex is messy. Porn is “clean,” i.e. hairless, and you never see lube. No sex during periods [Ed. note: no judgment here. Whatever floats your boat.].
Real world sex is responsible. Porn either doesn’t have condoms, or they magically appear. More condom use if it seems sexy.
“Lazy person sex” – after long day, really tired, but horny. Don’t want to lift a finger to get off. No representation of that in porn or other media.
Thumbnails & copy are all SFW, so no one has to slam down the laptop when someone walks by.
You can make personalized playlists, send them to people. Lets you tell people what you like w/o awkward conversations [Ed. Note: I don't get how this is less awkward than talking, necessarily, but what do I know?].
Could be the “Kinsey of today.” Had to design in-system scoring that is easy to use and one-handed. You hit the space bar to say “yes!”
Porn industry has been supportive. Gen Y in porn has reached out to her (entrepreneurial, ambitious, want to be part of the “new world order” of things.)
They’re not competing with porn. Most porn labeled “amateur” isn’t.
One viewer told her “Porn makes me want to jerk off. Your videos make me want to have sex.”
No bank in the U.S. will work with her because “porn” is in the name. No mainstream payment processor would work with her. Finally got PayPal challenger Douala (?) on board, had to go with a European bank and payment processor.
Porn is falling prey to the same dynamics as the music and publishing industries. Businesses play it safe by doing what everyone else is doing. Porn’s way of dealing with it is more controversial.
***”It’s not that porn degrades women. It’s that business degrades porn” Pushing any business into the shadows enables bad things to happen. She’s trying to change the world through sex, make sex better for everybody. Business world is trying to stop her. She says the business world is driven by men who believe men are their target audience. She listed women entrepreneurs who are doing great work (Nina Hartley, etc.) “Women challenge the status quo because we are never ‘it.’”
She listed a few other products or sites she felt were worth mentioning:

Vibease – device for couples in LTRs.
Offbeatr – website for sex projects
They Fit – custom-made condoms, no FDA approval in the US
Bang with Friends – launched about a month ago.

Average age of first seeing hardcore porn online today is 8. They don’t necessarily go looking for it.
Less than 5% of parents, she says, ever talk to their kids about sex. The talk has changed, as it needs to include discussion of what shows up in porn.
Legalities: 2 forms of ID, “no children, no poop, no animals.” Brought in adult industry lawyers to help.
Protecting privacy and IP: members-only site, no way to guarantee no piracy, though. They review everything submitted to the site before posting it. They remove videos on request if a couple breaks up.
Finance: adult industry-specific companies, payment processors, etc. She wants business partners who get their mission. AI-specific processors think they’re just porn, have extortionate rates. Even they though MLNP was too risky. Company like Manwin has $$$, has easier time with banking.
None of their videos have an “extraneous” cameraman. Spouse might record other spouse, or person might use webcam.
Difference between porn and sex ed. Teachers have asked to use MLNP dot com in their sex ed classes. So few people are willing to stand up for these issues, that everyone wants Cindy to do all of it.

A couple of questions stood out. Someone eventually asked if Cindy appears in any of the videos on her site. Less predictably, the questioner was a woman, and the question was asked very earnestly (as opposed to a pervy manner). A mother of teenagers got up and described how her kids have used the family computer to access adult content. She is worried about the false impressions they will get about sex, and so asked about how to use the MNLP video site to give her kids access to more realistic, perhaps even “educational” material. Mom of the Year? Quite possibly.

I could write for weeks about everything I think is wrong in the way we deal with the issue of sex. It’s prety screwed up in most of the world, but I’ll focus on the U.S. Her opening statement summed it up very well, though: we have unprecedented access to “adult” material, and not just through porn, but through an overall sexualization in our culture. At the same time, we still lack almost any ability to discuss it like rational adults, and we still attach ridiculous forms of stigma to people regarding sex. This applies to people who have sex a lot (cf. Sasha Grey), people who don’t have it at all (cf. Lolo Jones), and everything in between. And that’s only covering the conventionally-attractive young white woman demographic. Don’t get me started.

I went to a 15-minute session on copyright law after that. Blah blah fair use and so on. Then I went home to assemble more IKEA furniture.

SXSW 2013 Diary, Day 1 (March 8, 2013)

Posted on March 9, 2013 by wellsdc

I’m going to be honest here: I’m not really feeling it this year. I suspect that is approximately 100% due to the fact that I moved into a new house at the beginning of this week, and am experiencing the associated anxiety and odd depression that always seems to come with that. Don’t get me wrong, I love our new house. It’s just that I also sort of hate it at the moment.

It was in the midst of this chaos that I embarked on my second year as a badge holder at SXSW Interactive. Once again, I don’t really have a clear notion of my goals, other than to meet people, learn more about tech, blogging, and social media, and just be around talented, interesting, and occasionally self-important people. I’m sucking at the “meeting people” part so far, but being at the Austin Convention Center in a relatively festive atmosphere is a welcome reprieve from a week spent mediating between furniture deliveries, movers, and contactors. (Also, the purchase of a house with enough repair needs to quickly burn through most of our money, but let’s not go there just now.)

I took the Capital Metro rail for the first time, parking where I’m probably not supposed to park and riding the train to the final stop just outside the Convention Center. I don’t know if the train is usually that crowded, or if that is a SXSW effect, but it was a decent ride. It certainly beats trying to find parking downtown.

Since I don’t do much late-night partying anymore, I was able to arrive downtown at about 9:30, give or take, and it took a mere 5 minutes to get my badge. I remember last year needing about 20 minutes, but then seeing that the line had circumscribed the Convention Center later in the day. This would be an example of the hipness of being square – less time waiting in lines, or something.

I spent much of the morning catching up on work, and found the environment to be oddly conducive for work. Maybe there was some osmosis of creative power, or maybe I was just determined to finish so I could move on to fun things.

By the time I broke away from the siren call of legal-blogging-for-hire, I was not sure where I wanted to go. I considered catching a shuttle to a different venue for a panel on the business potential of animated GIFs, but ran into a friend who was going to a panel on disaster relief.

Disaster: The Future of Crisis Communications addressed how the Coast Guard has made use of social media and other technologies in disasters like Hurricanes Sandy and Irene. Very interesting stuff. Much of what they said seems obvious at first, but when you consider conditions after a disaster, you understand their importance, and how easy it might be to overlook them. In sufficiently serious crises, the very network we rely upon for information might be out of commission. How would we get information without our smartphones? Yes, many people still use things like radio or newspapers, but social media allows responders to get information out in, to use a cliché, real time.

Teaching Cheetahs: Disruptive Education in Africa was the only other panel I went to this day, partly because it sounded interesting, and partly because I didn’t have to change rooms. A group of panelists included two executives from a nonprofit that funds scholarships for top students from African to study at American universities, the founder of a Kenyan startup that provides tablets to students loaded with school curricula, and the director of an organziation that produces documentary videos highlighting educational needs. There was far more than I can justifiably summarize here, but the overall theme was “African solutions to African problems.” I just read an article the other day about well-intentioned but catastrophic efforts at aid to Africa, most of which amounted to dumping America’s leftovers in rural Africa rather than supporting infrastructure and education. It is also generally annoying that people in the U.S. often refer to “Africa” in a unitary sense, when in reality it is a continent with 54 countries (I think that’s the right number), about 1 billion people, and a wide diversity of culture, history, and language. It’s also more than twice the size of the U.S., so it’s big. Here are the organizations and companies represented, and I’d say they are worth checking out:

African Leadership Academy in South Africa
African Leadership Bridge in Austin, Texas
The Nobelity Project, also in Austin
eLimu, a startup based in Nairobi, Kenya

After that, I went home to assemble IKEA furniture.

Other highlights of the day included getting my picture taken in the Iron Throne…

…and also with Clifford the Big Red Dog…

There was also this odd display by 3M, which I call 3M’s 2D Hottie.

Lawyer Live-Tweets Delaware Courthouse Shooting, Draws Ire by Daring to Speak Ill of Guns

Posted on February 11, 2013 by wellsdc

(WARNING: I’m going to say some not-nice things about guns in this post. If this bothers you, please click this link.)

A gunman entered a courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware at about 8:00 a.m. local time this morning and shot at least four people, killing two, before police killed him. One of the deceased, according to CNN, might be his “estranged wife,” but nothing is certain, since this occurred less than two hours ago as I am typing this. I wish that I could add surprise to my disgust, but someone deciding to resolve things with their estranged spouse via bullets is not an original solution. My main impetus for buying a handgun in 2008, in my lawyering days, was out of a sense of discomfort around certain opposing parties in a few lawsuits.

What is still relatively novel is the phenomenon of live-tweeted tragedies. Anyone who has lived through a traumatic event knows that thoughts come in random and unpredictable ways. Anyone who makes frequent use of Twitter knows that people can now share those thoughts in as long as it takes to type 140 characters or less into a handy smartphone. They also know that a quick thought sent into the Twitterverse may be subject to extensive deconstruction by people who have the luxury of not being in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event, and who will presume to know better than that person how they should have responded.

That brings me to my point. I have never met Jennifer S. Lubinski, nor have I ever been to Wilmington, Delaware. We are privy to her thoughts on the experience, though, thanks to social media.

A woman was shot right in front of my partner.He hid behind our boxes of exhibits on handcart.He says woman will not make it.

— Jennifer S. Lubinski (@jslubinski) February 11, 2013

I just witnessed my first shooting.DE chancery court lobby.Multiple down.Police here.Where’s the #NRA asI’m hiding in parking lot? — Jennifer S. Lubinski (@jslubinski) February 11, 2013

I guess mentioning the NRA was her big mistake. As we all know, guns don’t kill people. That guy could have just as easily walked into that courthouse with a knife, baseball bat, or extremely taut rubber band and killed the same number of people, because shutuplibertySecondAmendmentFREEDOM. One might be tempted to call that hyperbole, but minor challenges to the sanctity of guns tend to bring out the sputtering and syntactically challenged among us. I really see no point in blocking out the names on these gems, especially since I am mostly going off of the tweets that Ms. Lubinski herself retweeted, or that were made in direct reply to her. Continue reading →

Something Even More Annoying than Food Pictures on Social Media

Posted on January 23, 2013 by wellsdc

Let’s face it: people are posting too many pictures of their food to social media sites, especially Instagram. I know, I know. I don’t have to look at the pictures, and no one is suggested imposing a legal ban on food pictures (so keep your First Amendment rants to yourself, thank you much). It’s just an irritating trend. In fact, pictures of food topped BuzzFeed’s list of “11 Things No One Wants to See You Instagram.”

That said, I will freely admit that I post pictures of food on occasion. On. Occasion.

The world needs to know that these exist. I regret nothing.

I am not a prolific poster on Instagram. I may post to Facebook every five minutes, according to some who probably wish they had my type of ADHD, but I try to limit photos to things that are interesting, unique, or for which I have an awesome caption. I do post pictures of food from time to time. Just this week, I posted a picture of the beignet pancakes I had at Kerbey Lane, because how often does anyone get to eat beignet pancakes? How awesome is the very concept of beignet pancakes??? Beignet freaking pancakes!!!!!!!

(I also reserve the right to post pictures of ridiculously overblown chili cheeseburgers and absurdly large cinnamon rolls. The common thread is a unique mix of superlative qualities and hyperbole.)

Apparently, some people have taken amateur food photography to a whole new level, according to the New York Times:

There are the foreign tourists who, despite their big cameras, tend to be very discreet. There are those who use a flash and annoy everyone around them. There are those who come equipped with gorillapods — those small, flexible tripods to use on their tables.

There are even those who stand on their chairs to shoot their plates from above.

People, get over yourselves. I mean, I know this is all taking place in Manhattan, the home of pretension those of us in the provinces can scarcely imagine, but really, gorillapods?

The solutions some of these restaurants have found, however, might be even more annoying than the food photography: Continue reading →

My Moment of Internet Fame, Dapper Octopus Edition (UPDATED x2)

Posted on December 29, 2012 by wellsdc

I’m just going to take a moment to toot my own horn and salute a pseudonymous Photoshop wizard. This is the story of how a funny picture I found, along with the caption I gave it, spent a few moments near the top of Reddit. (The story consists almost entirely of pictures, so chill.)

The picture apparently first popped up on Pinterest, and then made its way to Reddit, where someone, possibly a user named Zelvetical, gave the little guy a top hat:

I found it on a site called Dark Roasted Blend, and proceeded to share it on Facebook, then on Tumblr, where I added this caption:

All of human history has led us to the moment that we developed the technology to digitally add a top hat to a photo of an adorable miniature octopus.

As of the morning of Saturday, December 29, 2012, the Tumblr post has over 46,000 notes, which is a record for anything I’ve ever posted. Then I got this: Continue reading →

Instagram and Sturgeon’s Law

Posted on December 5, 2012 by wellsdc

“If you see the finger-mustache guy on the road, kill him!” -Zen Master Linji [citation needed]

To me, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, and various other social media sites that mostly involve photos just look like a giant collage maintained by a crazy person with expensive tastes.

When I first discovered Tumblr, it appeared to be largely devoted to pictures of empty Starbucks cups framing a slightly out-of-focus Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the background. When I joined Pinterest, the boards automatically assigned to me, which the system seemed to think I would like, consisted mainly of pictures of tiaras. I am not kidding. Instagram was closed off to me for most of its still-short life, on account of my not having an iPhone. I remedied that last summer, but I wouldn’t say I entirely understand what Instagram is all about. Thankfully, the comical folks at College Humor have let me know that I am not alone:

CollegeHumor’s Favorite Funny Videos

Here’s the thing, though. Several wise friends have pointed out that hating on hipsters and hipster-y things has reached a point of becoming pretty hipster-y in and of itself. I’m not going to stop ripping on the most annoying of the hipster tropes, but I am going to try to be a bit more thoughtful about it.

Instagram and its ilk brings to mind Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.”

This applies to any and all forms and genres of media, be it visual arts, television, or cleverly-filtered smart phone pictures of half-eaten gnocchi from a deli on the Lower East Side. (Do they have delis on the Lower East Side? I haven’t been to Manhattan in eleven years, and even then I was not required to navigate.) (Also, do they serve gnocchi in delis?) (What exactly is gnocchi?)

Somewhere amid all the detritus (and by detritus, I mean “pictures of finger mustaches”) are a few bits of awesome. Yes, there is more detritus out there, in part because there are more people in the world, but mostly because more of the people have access to the internet, and the means to take and post pictures. Some people genuinely believe their pictures are meaningful, while others believe posting bad pictures is a good idea. I’m sure we have all fit in both categories at times. If you can get past the coffee foam and blurry sunsets, every so often something good will pop up.

And while you’re waiting to find it, you can join me in derisive laughter at finger mustache guy.

Photo credit: ’Fingerstache’ by Vorhese [GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikipedia.