Category Archives: Internet

Google doesn’t understand the meaning of anonymity

It’s pretty well know that Google+ doesn’t allow people to use nicknames in their profiles. They claim that this will protect users from the “bad intentions” of evil hackers or spammers. This is just nonsense. This basically shows a lack of understanding of what a nick name means and how the use of a nickname can harm users.

If someone want to be anonymous with the intention to do something bad and get undiscovered, the worst thing to do is using a nickname. That romantic idea of a dangerous hacker with a cool nickname, chased by authorities, working in the night in humid and dirty abandoned apartments is unreal… This is not Hollywood! Matrix was just a movie… Hello! Google, knock knock please wake up…
In real life, far before Internet, people used and still use what is called a “fake identity” to make the task of authorities harder. I suggest to see this movie to understand what being an anonymous outlaw means. This means using a fake name, a name that looks real but it’s not a real one.

So is Google really checking if the name in the profile of some user is the real one? How are they going to check that? Are they asking the scanned copy of users passports? Are they asking to introduce your credit card number? Or, maybe, they will send someone to your home to confirm… your identity? Come on, please let’s be serious. If Google really wants to enforce and assure that users use their real names, so go ahead and implement real security measures to be 100% sure that the user is not using a fake identity. (Of course they will loose almost all their users if they do that, though) But if Google is not going to really check G+ profile identities, please stop wasting your time closing accounts and focus on many of the issues that people, for free, is asking you to improve.

Then look at this, in their privacy terms:

Google Profile.

In order to use Google+, you need to have a public Google Profile visible to the world, which at a minimum includes the name you chose for the profile. That name will be used across Google services and in some cases it may replace another name you’ve used when sharing content under your Google Account. We may display your Google Profile identity to people who have your email address or other identifying information.

Posts and other content shared by or with you – such as photos of you – may be visible on your profile to those with whom that content has been shared. You can use the profile editor to see how your profile appears to particular individuals.

“…which at a minimum includes the name you chose for the profile…”
Did you read that? The name you chose for the profile. I don’t see any indication to use my real name or “…by using a nick name your account will be suspended…”

This policy does not affect me personally, I used to write my real name everywhere, but I understand that many people have good reasons not to do so.
I just would like to see a little bit of common sense. For web illiterate people, this policy, shared among other social media platforms like Facebook, has a direct impact creating a wrong vision of how “identity” works on the web. People may do the wrong assumption like: people with nicknames = bad, people with “real” names = good. This policy is sending a wrong message, making people believe that by writing a “real name” you can trust that profile.

If somebody want to abuse the system, I can assure you, he/she doesn’t need a nick name to do so.

FreeLex project started!

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After a long time thinking, @depepi and I finally put together many ideas in a web, chose a domain name and started a non-profit project: FreeLex.

FreeLex means “free as in freedom” and Lex is the Latin word for “law”. So, it means “freedom of law”.

FreeLex main purpose is to try to make law understandable and accessible to everybody, more easy to understand. Living in a world of encrypted laws accessible only through the expensive assistance of
lawyers, is not the idea which a free and civilized society should be based on.

Thus, in order to start this process, why not do it with something that is on our daily lives: Internet. We deal everyday with hundreds of services. From email to video streaming, social networks and games. The possibilities are infinite and everyday more and more services are born… And you know, ALL of them have a contract to which you said: YES I ACCEPT!

In that very moment, something that could be considered just one OK Button, in fact is the equivalent to a legal sign.

Let me tell you something. If I go to your home, knock your door and I say “Hey! I have this service for you, would you like to use use it? It’s free!!” And just before you start using it, I show you a 30 pages block of paper full of small text and ask you to give me your sign, would you accept that contract?

Of course not. First you would like to read it… But, who has time to read that? So, are you going to sign it because you don’t have time to read it? I’m pretty sure you won’t accept that, and you would even think I’m trying to hoodwink you out your money or whatever. It just looks suspicions.

But you know what! We do this every time we join an online service like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, YouTube and many many others. How many of us have read the whole contract and after doing so, understood the whole thing? To be honest, I’m one of those thousands of people that just clicked ACCEPT because I didn’t have the time to read it. Just because it’s a graphical “ACCEPT” button on the screen doesn’t mean that it has *less* power than a sign. So, what to do? If I don’t have the time and the patience to read a several-pages-long contract, does it mean that I should avoid using the service? Some people would say yes, but that’s too “extremist” and almost no realistic.

So here FreeLex comes!

We want that Internet services use FreeLex to build easy and fast to understand agreements. So the user could quickly understand the main points that he/her is about to sign. All those huge contracts could be reduced to just one screen full of simplified icons with a descriptive text.

How to achieve that?

Based on a digital environment where the same laws of physics cannot be applied as-is, and where no-countries nor boundaries really exist, we have to think about patterns that match that environment in the same way the law match our material environment.

So an online contract for using a social network could be reduced to several specific points that won’t match a 100% all the legal text of the original contract but will help the user to understand what kind of rights and duties his/her digital identity has.

FreeLex can be extended to other scopes of all the legal scenario. We are living into the “Empire of Law”. It governs almost everything we are allowed to do or what we have to refrain to do because it is prohibited by law. Having a good understanding of it, will not only give us more freedom but also, will free us from the fear of being doing something illegal.

Let’s make law open, free and accessible to everybody.

If you like the idea, please collaborate with FreeLex, subscribe to the RSS to stay updated of new changes, also follow @free_lex on twitter. We are also on Facebook, like the page. If you can translate, help us to reach more people. If you know how to code, help us improving the FUFA builder. If you are a lawyer or a law student, you can help us localizing and improving our legal coding. If you are a designer you can also help improving our logos or website. Contact info at freelex dot eu

Soon there will be a wiki and a mailing list. Work is underway…

We got inspired by Creative Commons. Nobody invented anything from scratch. That’s the beauty of sharing. You use what others did before to create new things, to be inspired and improve our lives and environment :-)

What Linkedin should do to be Japanese

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Linkedin is trying to enter into the Japanese market. Sources: Asiajin, TechCrunch (Japanese)

It’s not only about translating the site. It’s all about understanding cultural differences. Here some points I think they should consider to be fully accepted among Japanese.

Give the option to use a predefined avatar. Don’t force people to use their photograph. Japanese take a lot of care of privacy and specially women don’t like to show their real picture on a public site. Linkedin is more a business, professional focused social network so, nobody would feel serious uploading the picture of a cat or dog, something really common in Japanese social networking. So giving the option to use some predefined funny avatars that could be chosen from a list or even letting the user to build one himself/herself. These would be really accepted among the Japanese public.
Don’t do literal translations. Translating a social network site into Japanese means to design the site for Japanese. A translation of the interface is not enough. This means that menus have to be modified, some options dropped and some other added.
Personal data should be completely configurable. For example, options like “I don’t want to show my profile to people from the following company” should exist and many more. Some people when leave their work don’t want to keep any relationship or contact with previous companies.
Roles should be adapted, not only translated. Many roles inside the company change and are different compared to the equivalent in US or Europe.
Also what kind of company, 株式会社 (public company, corporation, KK), 合同会社 (limited company), etc. Here a list. The concept may differ, and company types differ as well. It’s very important to understand this point and provide users the option to pick up the descriptions they feel comfortable with.
Understand how Japanese use social networking. Checking other successful sites is a must. Instead of trying to change their behavior and make them use SNS as Americans or Europeans do, it’s a better approach to adapt and have an appearance Japanese like.
Do alliances with many of the popular companies dedicated for job hunting and career opportunities like Pasona, Adeco, Human Resocia and so forth.

These are just few things to take care when creating a Japanese version of a social media site. For example, let’s see how facebook struggled while twitter grew as bamboo. One of the main reasons is because twitter didn’t force people to use their real names, neither their real pictures and also it didn’t force people to share so much personal information. Privacy is a real serious issue in Japan.
Of course Linkedin is not the kind of site to upload as an avatar the picture of a cat took with the mobile phone. Linkedin is for more “serious” talking, anyway dealing with the real face of somebody is not a requirement in Japanese SNS arena.

The most important advice Likedin should follow is: “Listen, listen and listen! First see how others do in Japan, understand the culture, understand how people interact, try to understand what people need and they still don’t find in other platforms. Listen to consultants having a long experience here and don’t try to quickly to convince a mature society as the Japanese to change their habits”

If Linkedin does its homework and walks the right way, it may have a really great success in Japan offering one thing that many other Japanese social network platforms still don’t properly offer: Internationalization.

To be or not to be a technology dependent.

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Since 1996 I was involved in the Open Source community, trying to contribute as much as I could to promote the use of open technologies. During this time many things happened in the industry, the community and my understanding of things as well.
After all these years I reached a personal conclusion: No matter how much Open Source Software is promoted or advocated, it will completely fail as far as formats are still closed.

Every one of us is, in some way, technology dependent, and companies as well. Specially companies! So, being dependent of technology from an abstract point of view is nothing bad, humans depend on it since the discovery of fire. Anyway being dependent on a specific technology means to become a slave of that technology provider.

Many companies don’t understand this important approach to technology. They need to get the job done and adopt a particular technology without a previous analysis about the impact of that decision in the future. The parameters some companies take care of are usually just price and support. That’s not enough. But also, sometimes it’s not possible to do a deep analysis of every product or technology that will be adopted; further, a serious analysis will not provide enough information or a realistic projection of the future and consequences.

Here is where Open Formats come to help and really solve this dependency problem. Why Open Formats and not Open Source? Because Open Source Software is not enough. For instance, OpenOffice. It is a great software suite, it is Open Source and its default format is the Open and widely tested and adopted OpenDocument Format (ODF).
I saw how some companies decided to use it as a replacement of Microsoft Word, saying “Cool! it’s a free cost Word to read Word docs!”.
This approach is foolish and irresponsible. They are just changing the software, for an Open Source one, but they still depend on the format. In this case the Microsoft Word document format. The technology dependency link didn’t get broken and sooner or later they will come back to Word and probably will blame the adoption of OpenOffice as a wrong decision.

Open Formats free us from that dependency, eliminating the unique link to the provider. For example, using the ODF document format, won’t link us to OpenOffice. It will link us to a Free and Open Format that frees us to use any software available to deal with such format. It also opens the possibility to create our own tools to operate with this format. It doesn’t matter if the Software is Open or Close as far as the critical information for our business is not linked under a dependency threat owned by a third party provider. Using Open Formats will assure this freedom from the provider dictatorship and will also open the market for other companies to create more competitive products that deal with an Open Format.

To avoid term confusions, let’s see them again:

- Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), doesn’t necessarily free us from technology dependence as far as the formats we use are still closed.

- Open Formats free us from any dependency link. We don’t depend on Close and Proprietary applications neither Open Source ones.

- FOSS, from a consumer point of view guarantees that our software tools will not die in time, perhaps by the bankruptcy of the company that developed them. Also FOSS guarantee the freedom from our side to modify, copy and distribute the software freely. FOSS make a switch from the unique product provider-support approach to the independent product provider-support approach, leaving an open road for competitive quality of service instead. Ok, it’s great! But anyway it doesn’t assure that our data will be available after 50 years from its conception. FOSS is just a tool, not the logical base for our data to last long. The format of our information will determine in a long term our real dependency and flexibility to technological changes. For example, a huge amount of the data collected in the first expeditions to the Moon is lost due cryptic and closed data formats used at that time…

The Format is the armor that makes possible information to be transferred, stored and visualized. Therefore, if the format is Open and free of royalties, this will assure that we will ALWAYS have our data available no matter what happens to the market, providers and technology.

To view a list of the most common open formats, check the wiki.

After 6 years of blogging and social networking

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I started to work with computers since I was a kid and as soon as Internet was available in my zone, and to my wallet, I was there connecting with a modem. But I had to wait until 2000 to decide to start some sort of personal presence online. I was a heavy email user before that time but I didn’t have a site, a domain. Social Media was a concept too far away in the future. It wasn’t until 2004 that I started a real personal website. I created some websites previously for clients but I didn’t think seriously to have my own. So in 2004 I started something like a blog that I created in PHP using text files. I had no time and not so much content to use a PHPNuke or some other sort of CMS. It was just an experiment. Later I stared using WordPress, and since that moment, I’m still a happy user of it.
Until that time, the idea of I-need-to-have-a-site wasn’t in my mind, like many of my colleges. It was more a sort of a geek-hobby than a real need, and the idea to build a profile and to have my personal history recorded in search engines was too far away… If I look at the past, I can see many mistakes and many good ideas. I hope this can help someone trying to start doing a personal site.

Let’s start with the mistakes.

Blogging

I didn’t have a clear target. A clear idea of what I wanted to do with a site. I didn’t even have the idea of building a profile as it is clear today. I just have the strong need to have a site, to have a domain that will be identified with myself so I can find new friends, make contacts and share ideas.

I cared too much about the design instead of the content. The enthusiasm of building a new page led me to think about colors, logo and background while the site was untouched for months. Content matters more than design.

Trying to follow strictly other bloggers recommendations. What works for some people doesn’t mean that will work for me. This was one of the more frustrating mistakes. Trying to follow exactly every recommendation was such a waste of time and resources. Just take other people recommendations as an advice, not as a rule to be followed. At the end I wasn’t satisfied with the results just because I was following the suggestions of someone that had a totally different personality and target than me. Don’t choose any guru, just listen, read a lot, and do what better fits with your needs.

Trying to write for everybody. That’s impossible. Everybody is different, I can’t write something that will like to every reader. Every blog has a public and I had to realize that I cannot make it attractive for everybody. This mistake led me to adapt, change and reorganize the content many times. Dropping posts, adding new ones that I was not really interested to write and so forth. It was a waste of time.

Waste to much time on statistics. I should made to myself these questions. Do I plan to earn money with my personal blog? Do I think that getting more and more visitors will really change my life in some way? Living from this blog was never my intention so why the hell I spent so much time checking the statistics? If you are not planning to live from your blog, just don’t waste your time checking how many people visit your site. Let it be…

About social networking…

Don’t try to get more followers. Social media is like physical interaction. Don’t try to be friend of everybody, it’s impossible. It’s a matter of time to get a real good number of followers/friends. If you try to “force” the process, maybe you will get soon a lot of followers and as soon as you get them, you will loose them. At the beginning people will start following you, and later, if they are not interested about what you say, they will eventually unfollow you. The same for friend based communities, like facebook. They won’t maybe delete you but they will ignore your posts, which is the same. The important is not the number but the quality, and a good quality follower is the one that really reads what you write and that really interact with you. If your blog becomes popular and the number of followers/friends increase dramatically that is a good sign, so don’t waste your time trying to increase numbers.

A good avatar matters. It matters as far as the avatar doesn’t consume too much of your time and resources. Choose something that match your personality. It doesn’t have to be your picture. I chose to put a clear picture of mine because It’s quite probable that I meet many of the people that I follow or follow me, so I want them to recognize me just in case we meet. But it’s not so important.

What I did right

Be yourself. Now I don’t care about the content, I don’t care if this fits with the main topic of this blog or not. This is a personal blog, not a specialized one. I just don’t care anymore. If you are going to write a blog of a specific topic, (I’m doing it for photography) of course you have to stick with it but for a personal site, where the main topic is what is happening around you, just be yourself. If you do that, you will attract people compatible with you who will like what you say. That’s the most valuable public for a personal site. Not the numbers but the quality.

Give more info about yourself. I realized that people was interested about the author of the blog, therefore they wanted to get more information about me. So putting a clear picture, a short and a log bio and some kind of resume is just refreshing for the reader. Just think about the fact that a reader of a personal blog is interested in the author and what’s going around him/her. Usually when I read somebody’s personal site I focus on his/her vision of the world and opinions, I want to know more about the author’s life and experiences. It’s like you are having a conversation with somebody you like.

After this time I just realized that it was quite easy to forget what was the real reason to start a personal blog: “share!” In case you want to do the same, I hope this helps you.

Knowledge won’t resist the power of time and human irresponsibility

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All the knowledge we have from ancient times comes from solid, physical storage materials, like stones, papyri and any other long term durable means used in the past to store some information. Of course, people at that time didn’t store information in a stone only because it would resist the centuries to come. Well, they maybe think about that, but it’s also important to keep in mind that there was not so many means to store information at that time.

The other way we are obtaining information is from natural evidences of the influence of mankind in the world. Like pollution, artificial reshaping of natural land and so forth. Also genetic research and the study of DNA is helping a lot to discover more about our history.

But let’s think about the future. Where are we storing our information nowadays? In digital formats on means that won’t last more than few years. The worst thing about all this is that nobody will be able to recover that information in case of a cataclysm or any other worldwide destruction. If I’m lost in an island and I have a hard drive, I will probably attach it into a stick and use it as a weapon to kill some animal and feed myself. I won’t be able to develop, by myself, the technology to recover that data, copy it and store it again in another “machine”.

Think about it, all your pictures, your documents, your own videos, everything lost just because digital storage won’t last more than a few years.
So just as ephemeral as human lives are, so our data is. Information dies as people do, and only some small pieces of that data remain, thanks to the unknown laws of fortune.

I suggest to keep some pictures in paper. Just print from time to time some of them, the one that you would like to last forever. Of course it’s a dream, nothing is eternal, but at least I can assure you that, those few pictures in paper will survive many more years that all your DVDs, Hard disks, memory cards, etc. In case I find myself lost in an island or as a survivor of a cataclysm, I can always look at some pictures in my wallet of beloved people or places. Your mobile phone is useless in such environment.

Also try to write sometimes some hand written letters. Email is ephemeral as well. It doesn’t even exist in our hard drive anymore. More and more people keep it in remote servers, so just imagine. Almost all your life is documented in emails. It’s like a personal diary. Everything lost forever. But remember that ancient books exist today because of paper: in proper conditions it can resists centuries. No data-center will survive more than 100 years without maintenance.

This post is just to remind you that technology is great but it’s still weak. We spend more money developing weapons and developing ways to increase profit than thinking about human inheritance. Knowledge is one of the first things that human will loose when mass scale disasters happen. People priority is survival. Everybody follows that instinct as a general rule. Knowledge is not so important when you are hungry. Let’s think about it :)

Open Network Lab with Ryan Holmes from HootSuite

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It was the first time for me to go to DG (Digital Garage) headquarters and this time it was to participate in an event called “Technical Founders” with Ryan Holmes, (@invoker) CEO of Hootsuite and Shinnichi Fujikawa, founder of Movatwi.
For those of you that don’t know what HootSuite is, if you are a twitter user, I suggest you to visit hootsuite.com and create an account to enjoy twitter from a completely new set of options. It’s a must for heavy twitter users. Movatwi is a twitter web site optimized for Japanese mobile phones. It was really interesting to listen to these entrepreneurs and understand the differences between Japanese and western mentality, about how they approach risks and goals.

Ryan Holmes

I went to that meeting to learn something new. I hoped I could learn some new formula, something that will give me the elements to start my own business. Is there a procedure? Something that I should do first? Some ancient book with the secret of success?

At the end, after listening to their experiences, the initial problems they had, some advices and the whole saga… the conclusion was so so simple!

Follow your dream, don’t stop, listen to people with common sense and run away from the negative ones. Adapt, learn, and remember that mistakes are good and let you learn more. Jump!

Well I knew all this before! Yes really, I knew it, well… Everybody knows, that’s what everybody say, but sometimes we refuse to follow simple things. We want to find something else, something special that will give us those secret elements to find the right path. Sorry but there is no such formula. Infinite paths could be chosen to reach the same point. How you do your own path, will determine a failure or a success. Of course you need investors and angels but as Ryan said, negative responses from one of the investors gave him the elements to approach the next one in a better way. It’s a learning process. Thus, you have to be ready to learn.

Pick up a book about “how to start-up” and just do it. But before you take any step, please, stop and think that you need 100% of self motivation. A 50% of your brain saying yes, the other 50% saying maybe and some spiritual part saying $#%&((!! is not enough. You will find the time, the resources, the advices while you are doing the path, but you need the determination to be sure what you want, and you will walk through it.

My good friend and fantastic photographer, Derek Arnwine

How many followers do you have?

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Once upon a time the concept behind the relationship between friends and strangers was reduced only in the possibility to have a direct or indirect link to someone.
For example a well connected guy had an agenda with the telephone numbers of people that he directly knew. That means that a physical contact and sharing some words was something obvious and the most basic element to get a phone number.
When internet invaded all aspects of our lives, the need to have a previously physical interaction with someone, in order to contact him or her, became secondary.

People started to interact using the email as the main communication medium realizing strong and real long term stable relationships. Eventually they would meet, but that wasn’t a must to consider each other contacts, or even good friends.

Before the social network revolution era, that means before Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and so forth; the concept of followers wasn’t common in the internet slang. For an average non-tech-geek guy, the concept of having followers only had a relationship with celebrities, politicians or religious figures.

Actually the concept of “followers” has a similar importance as the concept of “contacts in my agenda”. Followers in facebook, in twitter, friendfeed, Google Buzz and so forth create a halo of charisma that wasn’t ever achieved even with hundreds of telephone numbers or email addresses in an agenda. The concept of followers already extrapolated the world of the fame, politics, celebrities and religion to become a common term. It’s already something that everybody has.

Why followers are so important, even more than contacts, as an indicator of your human influence coefficient?

They are important because how we achieve a follower or a contact does matter. One thing is going to some event and present our business card to everybody hopping to collect as many business cards as we can, and another thing is being a content generator, a charisma hot spot, a human magnet that in some way results attractive to be followed.

Actually everybody potentially can be famous and followed. Everybody has the potential to have a huge influence over thousands of people. The fact that everybody has this potential will change things in the future, and I advice you to start thinking about these future changes.

It’s already happening. The more followers we have, the more social networks we participate in, the better to determine our possibilities to find, or not, a job. Not just a job, but a good one. It will determinate our potential to influence people, to change trends, to be a marketing tool. And the most interesting thing is: you can do it by creating content, being somebody worthily to follow. This simple concept has a collateral effect: Cultural Enrichment

The effort to provide something interesting, to provide new ideas, be intellectually useful and the possibility that everyone can achieve it, is a strong motivation factor that will positively affect the cultural level of our society.

The Future of Publishing

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A really interesting video. I found the link via twitter @FrankieBit

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Weq_sHxghcg&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

The main message is: “Things doesn’t end, just changes”
The publishing industry needs to adapt to the way people consumes information. It’s not about the death of something, but all about changes. Companies that are not able to change and to adapt have a common end: death.

It’s all about that and that’s good. Who wants a society with no changes?

One more message I love from this video is: “People is smarter than you think”
In fact the more information people assimilates, smarter and harder to convince them the task becomes. Maybe some governments try to reduce the education level, just to have more lambs that will obey to any new insane law or regulation. But information technology is providing, right now, a new source of information that is not under the control of few corporations or governments.

Walking the Path

Indie Developer, Photographer, Digital Nomad

Category Archives: Internet

FreeLex project started!

To be or not to be a technology dependent.

After 6 years of blogging and social networking

Let’s start with the mistakes.

Blogging

What I did right

Knowledge won’t resist the power of time and human irresponsibility

Open Network Lab with Ryan Holmes from HootSuite

How many followers do you have?

The Future of Publishing