… in name only, mind you.

2010: A new year, a new decade. It’s also an opportunity for us to eschew some of the vocabulary that has rotted since it attached itself to the lexicon of the industry over the last few years. We’re all painfully aware of some of the offending terms and phrases. “2.0″, “Smartphone”, “Twitter/Facebook/Google” (as verbs instead of nouns), … and my least favourite of the bunch…

Slap this term onto just about any product and you’re guaranteed to increase its [sales] appeal. Back when I worked in retail, I used to joke with my co-workers about adding the term “digital” to certain items just to see what would happen (we sold recreation/games related items at the time – pool tables, board games and such). People responded to it then, when it largely applied to products. People still respond to it now, as the term has spread like a virus to describe just about anything. You can’t have HDTV unless you have a “digital” cable box. Most billboards are being replaced by “digital” signs. Telcos boast about running their services on “digital high-speed networks” (at least they do north of the border). In fact, the term even defines the industry that I have been a part of for the last 9 years; “Digital” Marketing.

The following is (by and large) the accepted dictionary definition of the term “digital”:

1: (adj) digital (displaying numbers rather than scale positions) “digital clock”; “digital readout”
1: (adj) digital (relating to or performed with the fingers) “digital examination”
1: (adj) digital (of a circuit or device that represents magnitudes in digits) “digital computer”

Going by those definitions one can see that there is, at best, a tenuous connection between the term and how it is applied in common usage. For most, the term digital has come to mean something similar to the following:

“Anything to do with modern technology, gadgetry, computers, circuits, sci-fi, fast cars, outer space, and shiny things.”

Truth be told, this is still how I communicate all that is digital to some members of my family that are … less “with it”, but that’s both for their own good and my own sanity. I digress.

There is an argument to be made for the fact that “digital” (by definition #3 anyways) does in fact describe the mechanism that drives a LOT of the products and services we use. Pulses of electrons – 1’s and 0’s – provide the core syntax of the binary language, and it is this language that was first described as being digital. Thus, any bit of technology that made use of that language also had the unfortunate privilege of being described as such.

It’s time to stop. 1n 2010, using the term “digital” to increase the selling power of anything makes about as much sense as extolling the liquid properties of water. In fact, I would further suggest that if that’s the only thing you can think of to make your widget stand out from the rest, it’s probably not worth purchasing in the first place.

So, following by example, from now on AppTheta will no longer carry the Digital bit in its by-line. I promise to give the associated image a proper edit when I’m in front of a machine that sports something a tad more functional than MSPaint.

I am a Google Zealot. This is nothing, new, especially to those that know me. There are many, many aspects of my identity and the data that goes along with it, which are tied to one or more Google-related products. This is not to say that my life is an open-book, prone to scrutiny by random web-users from Buenos Aires or anything. I’m quite careful about the information that I opt to post online, as should everyone of course.

However, I was organizing/clearing out some items in Gmail the other day, when my eyes casually fell upon the indicator at the bottom of the screen that lets you know how much space you have left in the ever-expanding Google datastore. “You…blablabla…3% of 7400MB. Wow, 7400MB is a lot of-…wait. 3% I’ve got about 250MB of stuff on here.” I sat back and thought about that number, drawing relatively silly, almost cartoonish analogs just to get a sense of how much data that really is.

~230 floppy disks (remember those?).
~17,000 average (15K) Word documents, or about as many email messages of similar size.
~125,000 Twitter posts (to get even sillier, this is roughly equivalent to 14 tweets per hour, for a year)

That’s quite a bit of data!

…Sorry.

Then I wondered what I would say if a company were to come to me and say “Hey. So would you let me follow you around for a year and record what you say 14 times an hour? Oh and we’re not going to pay you for this information either. Oh and we’re also going to use this info to show you some advertising here and there.” Were I walking around just going about my daily life, I *might* have a problem with this. I mean, I don’t know if my shower-stall rendition of “Poker Face” is anything I want people listening to, never mind recording (Note: I do not actually sing in the shower.)

But the fact of the matter is, as I mentioned before, I’m making a conscious decision to post information online. As such, I’m aware that when using a Google service/product (for free), that information might actually be looked at. This is not to say that I’m allowing them to do whatever they want with it, mind you. Depending on the context (more on that in a second), I usually take a conservative approach and just presume that whatever post online will be considered public domain. Period.

What’s this about context you say? Well, truth be told, there are in fact some small corners of the internet that are marginally more “obscure” than others. I’m not talking about seedy underground file-sharing sites or any other “non http” source. I’m referring to the fairly niche clusters of community-oriented sites, blogs, forums and portals that serve members with similar interests. ArsTechnica, xkcd, Orchid Forums, and even certain social networking groups are just a few examples. Popular in their own right, and yet focused enough to attract users who search for information within a particular subset of info.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t be cognizant of material that you post in these instances, but it does tend to be the case that the level of familiarity amongst users in these sub-cultures is high enough to allow certain things (Vacation photos, discussions regarding family members etc…) to pass. But I digress.

As time goes on, more and more of your information is going to end up in the cloud. It is inevitable. The netbook segment of the hardware market is exploding. Businesses are adopting cloud infrastructure, enabling their employees more flexibility and freedom to work wherever they want to, physically separated from their information/data. Data storage limits are at a point where petabyte thumb drives (~1,000,000 Gigabytes, people) aren’t that far off. As far as cost/benefit goes, it just makes more sense (for now). We look at the concept of “unlimited storage space” today, in very much the same way we looked at the concept of smart-phones 5 years ago. Nifty sounding tech, but there are too many limitations to make it feasible for the consumer market… look how that turned out. So as this data migration occurs, it just makes sense to realize that parts of our identity are going to do the same.

I’m allowed 2 TNG references in once post.

I came across the following article just now, in which Twitter founder Biz Stone hinted at the company’s plans to generate some Benjamins in 2010 and beyond. Apparently they’re not in much of rush to do so.

Wired Article: Twitter To Make Money In 2010 With ‘Non-Traditional’ Ads: Biz Stone

Stone stressed the company mantra was that it was in no hurry to come up with a business plan, and needn’t be.

“There are no dates when we need to break even. We have plenty of money in the bank,”

Ok, I get this. You need a plan before you can go out and start generating revenue. But the general tone seems to indicate that while they’re doing all of this planning, the rest of the world is going to sit around and wait for them. I know that there aren’t that many direct competitors with the big T, especially those that have as deep pockets. I just don’t know if this seemingly laissez-faire attitude is the right way to go though. It doesn’t take long for the lions to realize there’s slow moving prey on the savannah.

Granted, Twitter’s recently acquired another 100 million dollars in funding without breaking a sweat. That beats my recent efforts by… about 100 million (you know, give or take). I’m definitely going to be keeping an eye open to see what their “non-traditional” advertising model is all about. Personally, I’d like to see something along the lines of flyers being dropped from giant neon zeppelins shaped like blue, fire-breathing Twitterbirds.

Just a few quick thoughts about URL shortening services, like the explosively popular Bit.ly, and it’s lesser known rivals Ow.ly, TinyURL and others.

They’ve become the standard mechanism by which people share links via microblogs like Twitter, and they’re even being adopted on forums, and other social networking sites.

As fantastic as they are for compressing unwieldy links that can end up being hundreds of characters of long (think driving directions from Google Maps), they can also be somewhat dangerous. See, I used to be (and still am) one of those people that would visually inspect a link and try to deduce whether or not I’d be clicking through to something interesting, or if I’d be greeted with flashing neon backgrounds and promises of “sexy singles in my area.” This is actually quite helpful in avoiding links that are most often, inadvertently sent through instant messages or email, by users that have fallen victim to a worm or a virus of some sort.

But with a nice, neat, short URL, there’s no way to tell the difference between the benign and malevolent. I realize that some of the bigger players are offering up ways to preview the contents of the URL beforehand (see TweetDeck’s preview URL function as an example of this.), but this does little to deter the average user from blindly clicking on a link from someone that’s considered a “trusted” source.

I see a lot of room here for 3rd party developers to hook into URL shorteners to expand preview functionality in order to minimize the clickthroughs for these virtual wolves in sheep’s clothing. Perhaps making more use of alt-tags to display long URLs, or color-coding the short URL in such case that it’s been reported as malicious/dead. Those of us in the digital space have spent years being indoctrinated against the use of “mystery meat” navigation. Links (image or otherwise) should be clear enough so as to eliminate, or at least minimize ambiguity for the user. URL shortening in its present incarnation just seems like a step away from that.

I’m going to put the content from this post (God help me, I was *this* close to calling it a ‘tweet’) into two separate buckets: One to describe the differences between my initial and present perceptions of this 800-pound social media pachyderm, and one to describe what’s remained largely the same.

Where I went wrong:

Prior to it’s explosion in 2008-2009, Twitter had been around quietly adopting a modest userbase since about 2006, playing off of the same basic model as other microblogging platforms like Pownce, Identi.ca and others. Outside of the blogosphere though (yes, that was me you heard sighing at another term I despise using), virtually nothing was known about it. When I first started looking into the service, my guess was that the VAST majority of users would be essentially be of the “fast-food” variety. Get in fast, get a quick bite, get that heavy, bloated feeling as you wonder why you’re there in the first place, and then get out.

I also assumed that commercial entities/businesses would fail to see value in it, based on the fact that the business world is just NOW starting to understand the benefits of social tools. Further, I assumed the celebrosphere (… give me that one at least? They’ve done a LOT worse.) would embrace Twitter for as long as takes FOX to cancel a series, and be done with it.

Well,… not so much. Though current numbers suggest that there are crests and troughs with regards to who uses Twitter and for how long, there are FAR many more persistent users than I thought there would be (to be conservative) figure 1 million people broadcasting their lives in little micro-bursts over the course of the last year).

Amongst the masses is an unexpected group of users; the same businesses that I thought would have turned a blind eye to this thing. Sony Pictures, Time Magazine, the Discovery Channel, the Beeb… the list goes on. Mind you, there are a few that I totally expected to be there from the start (Explore Music and iTunes Trailers being among them).

As far as celebrity involvement that pushes beyond the boundaries of toy-dog updates and upcoming project promos? They’re there as well, and the list extends beyond the usual suspects. People like ICE-T (yes that ICE-T) broadcast daily images, quotes, and fields questions in between filming on set. “DJ” John Larroquette is among the many people posting their latest musical selections using Last.fm’s popular service. Drew Carey recently offered to donate $1 for every follower he obtained (up to 1,000,000) to the Live Strong Foundation. I can’t be the only one who finds that even slightly innovative.

Where I was right:

Even given a level of interaction and involvement amongst the Twitter community that is MUCH deeper than I anticipated, the overall environment is still dominated by spectators and transient users. Amongst my own very meager following, I’ve had people post once or twice and then go dead silent ever since. This is expected though, regardless of the technology or service that you look at (How many people out there have a blog with less than 3 posts?). However, I think this will change once a much tighter integration between mobile services and handsets is introduced. Twitter has to be part of every mobile device out there, by default, full stop. Further, proper data plans and pricing need to be there to support it (especially in Canada.)

A significant percentage of accounts out there are spambots (especially porn related spam bots). That’s just reality. Where technology evolves, porn will follow. Like it or not, the adult industry is a leader in technology development and innovation, and their balance sheets will indicate nothing less. There are a few tools and services out there that attempt to minimize the intrusion (no pun intended), but by and large it’s best to just click and unfollow these sexy, language challenged sirens when they come knocking.

Lastly, the following remains true about Twitter: For every person out there that “gets” it, I can guarantee you that there are probably 5 more that don’t. I’m gradually making my way over to the “get it” camp, but I’d still need to see exactly where this company is going in the next 12 months before the lightbulb goes to go off in my head. Is there a business model, or is it all about building a userbase? Does it maintain its residence as a “site”, or does it truly make its home on mobiles? How will commercial interests be accommodated?

As far as I’m concerned, this is still very much a “wait and see” game.

It’s Christmas morning, and you’re 5 years old. You rush downstairs before everyone else and start tearing into that one gift that’s been teasing you with its shiny wrapping and big red bow for what seems like forever. Shreds of paper begin to rain down as your eyes widen at the sight of… a brand new chemistry set.

That’s pretty much how I felt about Google Wave when I first looked received my invite. It could be awesome… later, once I actually figure out what to do with it. But because it’s in limited beta right now, there aren’t really enough people that I can interact with in order to take advantage of all of its features. … Ok, a chemistry set isn’t really a social device, but you get my drift.

Don’t get me wrong. I “get” why it’s awesome. I just haven’t been able to experience it for myself. Depending on how long it’s in beta (which is likely to be quite some time, given their track record with their other products) I suppose the userbase will grow, and soon we’ll all be engaged in really rich conversations about the most recent episode of House, or how much I loathe green peppers or something.

That’s one of the things that amuses me about the mass audience (myself included). We seem to crave really cool, ever advancing technology to perform the simplest of tasks. The vast assortment of new applications dedicated to interesting ways to churn out 140 character posts on Twitter is proof of this. What do any of these apps do that’s really THAT much different from sending a text message to one or more people? Further, given that there IS a difference, how many of us take full advantage of even the most basic features? Given the iconic nature of the image below, I’m willing to bet it isn’t many.

If you’ve seen any of the trailer videos for Google Wave, they make a pretty good case for how it could be used in the course of daily events. A near seamless blending of email/IM/texting etc., making the sharing of information that much easier. But given the ever present challenge of convincing people to change their online habits (IE is still the leading web browser, despite Firefox/Chrome/Safari being better products in my opinion), I’m a little apprehensive about how fast this will take place. This isn’t merely a new tool, it’s a new toolset that’s going to require people to change the way they think about how they communicate.

I guess, as with most things, we shall wait and see. If anyone else out there has access to Wave and wants to give it a spin, drop me a line at my Gmail account (Chris DOT Baboolal).

The most annoying thing about me, well the “online representation that is me”, is something that happens when you do a standard Google search for my name.

Over the years, I’ve become somewhat possessive over the first page of search results for “Chris Baboolal”. I figure my last name is uncommon enough that I should be able to dominate the first page without very much effort. And by most accounts, I do.

By most accounts. Settling in the top 3 (or sometimes, much to my chagrin, at #1) is a Facebook result for an individual who IS NOT ME, Chris Baboolal. I repeat, I – Chris Baboolal – am not one of the 3 younger-looking people in this person’s profile picture who are happily flipping the bird to the entire world. In fact, aside from the dummy account that’s linked to this blog, I’m not even on Facebook! I am however, the Chris Baboolal that appears in the LinkedIn entry, the Chris Baboolal that appears as the owner of this blog, the Chris Baboolal that appears in the AgencyScoop profile, and so on.

My issue isn’t so much with my namesake from Facebook. In fact, he’s probably completely unaware of his search result placement. At least I hope so. Unless you posess the same nerdish leanings as I do, personal-SE rankings aren’t the kind of thing the average human loses that much sleep over. My issue is moreso to do with the fact that people remain largely clueless about how their online information is accessed and presented to the rest of the world (as I indicated in my previous blog post).

This world – that of SEO, Web 2.0, social media, and all other things “Digital” – happens to be the world that I play in, and make my living from. Further, as Gina Trapani has mentioned recently, Google has largely replaced the business card when it comes to exchanging professional information. Given that, the content of the first page [of search results] may be slightly more relevant to “this” Chris Baboolal (me) than others.

The problem of course is that Facebook is such a behemoth, that trying to knock “that” Chris Baboolal off of the first-page would be about as successful as trying to ressurrect the career of Pauly Shore. Nonetheless, the only failed effort is the one that ceases I suppose. Alright, how many is that…*counts* 8. Not bad.

Well, we’ll see if see how much of an effect this has on the top 3 results at least. Until then, this is Chris Baboolal.

Chris Baboolal Chris Baboolal Chris Baboolal … *runs*

[I apologize to any Bjork fan who reads the title of this post and now has that song stuck in their heads. ]

It’s no secret that I’m fairly liberal when it comes to my views on online privacy, so long as a few important caveats are considered. Be conscious of what you post online and where you post it. Where possible, make sure that you have a copy of all information you post online. Resign yourself to the fact that once you post something online, it is PERMANENT, and chances are slim that it will ever really disappear. Falls into the realm of common sense when you think about it, but it’s usually the case that we start freaking out whenever we’ve posted something online and one of those tenets have been ignored.

This isn’t me by the way… I swear

So that being said, I was wondering, where do you draw the line, when it comes to protecting your privacy online? How far do you go to make sure that photo of you doing the Elaine Benes at last year’s office Xmas party doesn’t spread further than desired? Think about this. You’re at said party and you’ve had a drink or two, and you start to bust a move on the dance floor. There are a couple dozen people around, and there’s a good chance that most of them have a cellphone that can snap a sub-par image of you kickin’ those heels at awkward angles. There’s also a good chance that some of those cellphone shutterbugs have access to a Facebook/Twitter/Blog account of some sort. Further, with almost frightening ease, that same image can be online and available to hundreds of thousands of people before you’ve had a chance to stumble off the dance floor.

Realistically speaking, unless you’ve instilled the fear of God in all of those around you, there’s actually nothing you can do to prevent your submission to become the next iconic YouTube star. Now sure, should you become aware of embarrassing content, you can always go through the process of trying to have it removed from the internet. That’s always worked in the past, right?

This makes me think about the intense amount of effort that’s going into making behemoths like Google and Facebook try to conform to privacy legislation. Presumably the point of such legislation is to ensure that when you sign up for services provided by the Goog et al, that you are explicitly made aware of what information you’re providing and how it could be used in the future (which, as you’ll recall is related to one of the caveats that I listed above).

Even if this is accomplished, it does nothing significant to allay peoples’ actual fear of unwanted information being released/exposed to other people. The reason for this remains the same; people post information online without full realizing what they’re doing, for whatever reason. A recent by-product of this type of behaviour is the “Texts From Last Night” (TFLN) website (link), a site which allows anyone to submit text messages that they’ve received, to be broadcast to the world. Names and other personally identifying information are usually unattached, but it’s an example of how the onus should always be on the user to monitor and control the information that they make available to others, and to accept (or at the very least be aware of the consequences of doing so).

And yet, we still give our credit cards to complete strangers and watch them disappear from sight when we purchase things offline.

Before I ramble, let me qualify by pointing out that this may very well be common knowledge amongst the few enlightened individuals out there that “get it.” I fully and completely admit that I quite simply didn’t get it (and I probably still don’t). I’ve been on Twitter for a while now, taking mental note of what’s going on and how it works. I think I can communicate the essence of what Twitter is, in one simple word.

Everything I’ve experienced with Twitter thus far has enforced the idea that it’s all about the present, give or take the last 12 hours or so. People could care less about what happened on Twitter before then. I haven’t seen anyone retweet something that’s older. Trending topics only seem to cover that time span as well.

It’s NOT an archive. It’s NOT a storage space, or a “traditional” online community that’s geared towards sifting through past content. It’s a constant stream of peoples’ personal bi-lines and reference links that … for reasons that still elude me, seem to generate interest. I’m not exclusive from that group either. I’ve often found myself responding and contributing to that stream just as everyone else is.

Maybe there’s nothing to explicitly understand. Perhaps Twitter is no different than conversation amongst large groups of people in an offline context as well. Now there’s a thought. What would conversation look like if I were to say, plonk myself down in the middle of a busy courtyard or some other meeting place where people engage each other. Would it be the similar?

… more to come.

As I fell asleep last night, a thought began to coalesce which accurately summed up what I’ve learned so far from being on Twitter. About a half hour later I woke up in a daze and wrote down that thought, hoping to expand on it at some point today. Of course, when I looked at that note this morning it was apparent that my moment of clarity was anything but (hence the title of today’s post – 2 points to anyone who gets the reference):

Fortunately, with a little caffeine and some online radio tunes, I’m able to recover some of the highlights. The early-adopt / early-abandon method was definitely taken by a LOT of people, as evidenced by several accounts that only 1 or 2 posts in the first couple of days since joining. There’s a strong, active community of people (celebs and non-celebs alike) that post no less than a half a dozen random thoughts per day. And then there are some that post one or two well-crafted thoughts with attached links whenever the mood strikes. Of course, there’s a healthy number of hybrid Twitterers (Tweeters? – forgive me, I still haven’t really absorbed the clique-lingo) that fill out the scatterplot as well, of which I consider myself to be one of.

From what I gather, people haven’t come to a consensus about exactly WHAT Twitter is. To some it’s a blog, to others it’s a megaphone, and still yet to others it’s like some sort of lasso, used to corral the random thoughts of others for later processing. As I posted some time ago, it’s not unique, but I suppose all that matters is that it’s still standing.

Some other random highlights:

Brent Spiner – Still amusing, still weird, still strangely compelling to read.
Alan Cross – Yet another channel to follow one of radio’s most knowledgeable and entertaining personalities.
@EverySpam/PornBot that has ever added me to their list – Perpetual proof that there will always be a mechanism out there to add noise to balance out the signal.