(This is part 2 of a multi-part series; click here for part 1.)

The prom queen

This individual (and it’s just as likely to be a “prom king” as the queen) is a true social butterfly. Online media—Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace—is just another one of many tools she uses to keep her social circle intact. While she may not have been her high school’s actual prom queen, she almost certainly still keeps in touch with her.

She’s a planner—she organizes gatherings, soccer games, poker games for her spouse, and feels involved whenever she has direct control over an activity. Whether it’s running the annual candy sale for her children’s junior high school orchestra, or putting together the annual reunion for her college graduating class, she’s an integral part.

She drives a minivan.

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Waterlogged school buses in New Orleans, August 2005 (photo by Allan Campbell)

Approximately five years ago, one of the most devastating natural(?) disasters in US history occurred. Early on the morning of August 28, 2005, Hurricane Katrina plowed into the Mississippi river delta and up towards New Orleans.

The first reports seemed to indicate that the city had survived relatively unscathed. But an hour or so later, the world began to receive reports that the levees, long viewed as the weakest part of New Orlean’s hurricane defensive shield, had begun to fail, and the city was filling with water.

The story is fairly well known, but I had a small part in the midst of it. At the time, I was an engineer for Yahoo! News, and Katrina rapidly became the top story. We watched as our traffic doubled, then tripled, then quintupled our normal daily rate. And it stayed at that level, with little variance, for the next week or more.

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(This is part 1 of a multi-part series.)

In keeping with my homage to William James, I suppose that this blog post should be subtitled, “A Study in Human Nature.” However, my goals are not quite so lofty as James’s; I am merely an observer, and not a philosopher, of online social activities. Perhaps a better title would be, “A Field Guide to the Social Media Participants of the Online Realm,” but even that is a bit pretentious, don’t you think?

Those of us who live in the rarefied air of Silicon Valley tend to assume, almost always incorrectly, that the “rest of the world” experiences social media the way we do. It therefore comes as quite a shock, at times, to discover that there are enormous hordes of online users who do not experience the Internet the way we do. Here are some facts about the “other half” of the online world:

• Many of them do not know what a URL is, nor what a search engine is. There’s a reason that the most common search query at Yahoo! is “Google,” and the most common search query at Google is “Yahoo.”
• The term hyperlink has no meaning and is probably confused with something in science fiction.
• They have never heard of Techmeme, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, TechCrunch, or any of the other dozens of sites that we tend to rely on for our daily news.
• They believe that the Internet is a scary and dangerous place, and will rarely, if ever, divulge any personal information, much less their credit card numbers, online.
• They have no sense at all of the relatively safety or security of one website versus another. “https://” vs. “http://” is meaningless.
• They tend to perceive Internet sites as TV channels: different content, to be sure, but fundamentally the same technology.
• If they notice the URL, they get concerned if the site does not use “www.” before the domain name, thinking that it somehow controls the behavior of the web.

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Inspired by this FriendFeed post, which points to this article, I’ve gathered together the stuff that I usually carry on my person.

All the stuff that I usually have with me

Clockwise (from top left): wallet, iPhone 3Gs, guitar pick, Citizen Nighthawk watch, fountain pen, external microphone (enhanced video/audio recording with the iPhone), a Yahoo!-branded Jawbone Bluetooth headset, keys, eyeglass cloth, Buck knife, change, small Leatherman flashlight, another key, and my trusty Levenger pocket briefcase.

Update: Alex Moskalyuk, my friend at Facebook (seen in the image below), tells me, “Yeah, they should’ve made it clearer. It’s available to 100% on the read side, write side (actual check-ins) are rolled out gradually. If nothing bad happens, check again this evening.”

With great fanfare, Facebook announced Places yesterday, their version of the somewhat popular geo-location services that haven’t really swept the nation. Like their competitors/partners Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Yelp!, and a few others, the idea is that you can, from your mobile device, “check in” to a location and let your friends/stalkers know where you are.

Facebook Places; no check ins allowed

There’s just one problem: they left out the “Check in” button. Either that, or I’m too stupid to use their application. When I run it, I get a screen that shows me where some of my friends are, so it’s obviously working for them, but it sure isn’t working for me.

According to their FAQ, the application is “available to users in the United States.” I suppose it’s possible that I’ve been transported outside the US, or that California seceded from the Union in the last 12 hours, but I think I would have heard about that.

So this is the review that I would have written had the product I would have written about actually worked.

In all honesty, however, I’m sure it’s a really, really great feature. I have no idea why the “Check In” button is not available; presumably some technical issues with Facebook.

It’s not creepy at all. If it is, then the San Francisco Chronicle has instructions on how to opt-out of having your location shared.

Rob Michael (of the Atmos Trio) has a great video showing how he made his latest track, a cover of the Doobie Brother’s well-known “Takin’ it to the streets.” The great thing is that all the video is synchronized with the audio, so you can actually see him playing guitar, ukulele(!), bass, and MIDI keyboard throughout;

(My favorite part is the final ukulele solo as it fades out.)

It’s very creative, and it’s an insightful look into the process required to produce something of this quality. If you’ve ever been involved in professional music production, you’ll understand that much goes on “behind the scenes,” and this video gives you some insight into that.

I see that Skype has updated its iPhone application this morning. The app had been updated to run on iOS4 and support background operation (i.e., being able to stay running and receive calls while in the background), but had reportedly caused serious power consumption problems. In my own personal test, with Skype alone running in the background, my battery went from 100% to 73% in a little under an hour—with the power plugged in! Obviously, this really made background operation unfeasible, and many people like myself avoided it.

The new version (2.1.1) makes no mention of the power issue in the release notes, but it does mention these new features:

• You can now disable IM alerts
• The dialpad is now more responsive (ed: I wonder what that means?)
• The behavior of the volume, when Skype interacts with other apps, is better
• When your status is set to Do Not Disturb, notifications are not shown when the app is running in the background.

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