Niki Cheong » What The Tweet

Of social media and new gadgets

niki — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:00:44 +0000

Co-written with David Lian

Just like that, 2011 has passed us by and so much has happened in the technology world. Both of us can hardly keep up with what’s been happening, given the break-neck speed at which things changed and developed all year long.

More significantly, technology has shown this year that it matters beyond the world of geeks; it has played a major role in the world at large, particularly at the intersection of technology, society and culture.

This year was where all these forces came head to head. And along that vein, each of us has picked our choices of the most significant technology-related moments of the past year.

Tablets and the Amazon Kindle Fire

Right from the start 2011 was hailed the “year of the tablet”. Google was releasing Honeycomb, and several manufacturers had already shown off prototypes of other Android tablets.

We were pretty much bound for disappointment on this count, until Amazon came out with the Kindle Fire recently.

Okay, so it hasn’t hit Malaysia yet but the Kindle Fire did what a bunch of other 2011 tablets challenging the iPad failed to do: It changed the game, faster than even Apple could.

You see, before the Kindle Fire, the tablet market was all about product specifications, faster processors, cooler Android skins and better marketing. Prices hovered near the iPad range, and the only real innovation was the seven-inch form factor first introduced by Samsung via its Galaxy Tab.

The Kindle Fire changed all that with a US$199 (RM628) price tag, and decent enough specs and a beautiful screen. More importantly, it wasn’t a tablet for the sake of being a tablet, but rather as a gateway to buying all of Amazon’s digital content and goods.

Rather than making money off selling you a piece of hardware, Amazon is selling you a piece of hardware to make money off you buying videos, music, books and any other piece of content they can sell you from their store. The best part is – this model works and Amazon is the best positioned company to take this on. Next year, I’m expecting to see lots of solid tablet options aimed at competing with the Amazon Kindle Fire instead of the iPad, and lots of folks toting seven-inch tablets. – David Lian

Year of the Protestors

Say what you like about how social media was just an enabler of revolutions but I challenge you to find a time in history when so much change (and impact) could descend upon the world in under 365 days.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is thanks to social media. Granted, many of the revolutions were a long time-coming. After all, the sentiments that the public held in contempt of those in power are not new.

Yet, one can hardly argue that if it was not for social media networks – be it Facebook or Twitter – the public would never have felt as empowered as they did, even in countries where the change they were hoping for did not come their way.

Time magazine may have named the “Protestors” as their Person Of The Year. I would rather look at how social media was integral to their strategies for mobilising the people. Just look at the #Occupy movement around the world as an example. – Niki Cheong

Group buying

Somewhere deep inside each of us, there’s a little Kiasu Malaysian waiting to get out. Unfortunately, that Kiasu Malaysian just got unleashed this year with the string of group buying sites now flooding the market.

Somehow, I don’t remember it being this prevalent in 2010, but when Groupon entered Malaysia by buying over local leader GroupsMore, it seemed to kick the group-buying trend in Malaysia up a couple of notches. Instead of seedy discounts offered for obscure holiday packages and slimming trials (or “experiences” as they were marketed previously), we get good discounts on good brands, and at the very least, some top name restaurants offering really good deals on meals.

The cheap person in me wants to rush out and buy as many Groupons as I can. The savvy person realises I’m probably going to forget to use half of them. – DL

Timelines

It may have only been rolled out for a couple of weeks but one of social media’s biggest stories of 2011 has to be the introduction of the Facebook Timeline.

People may whine and whinge about how it changes the look of their profile but this is probably the most significant aesthetic change Facebook has introduced in a long time.

Look aside, this move by the social media giant could serve as a warning to its competitors, especially as speculation of an IPO gets rife, to show just how much of an institution it already is.

Numbers or users aside (the largest in the world, in case you didn’t know), Timeline also shows other networks what Facebook has that they might not – years of history with its users.

Users who have been with the network from the beginning would have close to a decade’s worth of history saved onto the site, which is now available at a mere click. It not only helps users walk down memory lane but also reminds them just how much they (the user and Facebook) have gone through together over the years.

Who needs to write an autobiography these days? Just make your timeline public (if you dare to share your life with the world!). – NC

Steve Jobs

You might think it’s cliche that Steve Job gets a mention, but in my mind, his passing stands out as one of the best covered events on the Internet, surpassing even Michael Jackson’s.

When the announcement first broke on Twitter, it smashed a number of records with hashtags #iSad and #ThankYouSteve jamming up Twitter and Facebook. Then came the wave of inevitable Steve Jobs quotes flooding everyone’s wall. And this is merely on social network sites.

Blogs, columns and yes, whole websites, started commemorating the inventor of the Apple devices we all love. So if this doesn’t get him a mention as perhaps one of the biggest “things” to happen in the technology or social world, I don’t know what else does. - DL

Google+

While Google+ is not yet a #fail story, one really has to wonder when it’ll all come together for the Internet giant.

Earlier this year, Google released its new social network in beta mode to selected users, although control wasn’t that tight and most early adopters found themselves actively using it within weeks.

Unfortunately for Google, it seems that many of the said early adopters have left the network, or at least left their accounts idle. The biggest problem? No one really knows what adding people to “Circles” mean. Facebook took the easy way out with “Friends” while Twitter’s “Follow” concept is easy enough to grasp.

Despite the bad press (more to do with its initial push for users to use their real names), Google+ is still running, probably because it owns such a huge database of users from its Gmail accounts which makes it easier for new users to start using the network.

But you can’t force these things. If Google doesn’t think of more nifty ideas (such as organising a Google+ Hangout session between the Dalai Lama and Reverend Desmond Tutu), Google+ might just go along the same route as Google Wave and Google Buzz before it.

And that’s nowhere. – NC

> First published in What The Tweet, The Star R.AGE on Dec 28, 2011

To Predict or Not

niki — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:00:39 +0000

In the past few years, social media “predictions” have been a popular subject to approach, especially towards the end of the year.

With social media being such a “new” phenomenon, it was easy getting caught up in it. Will next year see Twitter trump Facebook, or will Google come up with something to kill off its blue nemesis (it tried, and failed miserably in 2011)?

Who can blame the experts, analysts or academics their predictions? After all, isn’t this the era of new media technologies that move so fast there’s always something new to look into?

Well, not really.

If anything, 2011 has taught us that it’s not the mediums and the networks we should be focusing on.

There was the prediction that this was the year of geolocation – you could tag your tweets with data about where you were, while Facebook’s “check-in” was supposedly going to crush Foursquare. Except that it never really took off, so Facebook essentially killed it and Foursquare remains a niche network.

Some people who saw this coming decided that it would be more accurate to look at it from a business point of view. After all, how many new networks can one deal with? So, while predictions about which social media network will go public entertained us all year, we’re actually still guessing when all of it will happen.

I suspect that while we obsessed over what was coming next – in an effort to one up each other – we forgot to look at what was already at hand.

The biggest mistake in 2011 was asking what was coming next when we should have focused on what the current big guns had in store.

If we just looked at the more mainstream networks, Facebook introduced the social graph and its Timeline, which look set to change the way the Internet functions forever.

Twitter gave us several new looks – not just via its web version but also with its native apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Then more recently, we saw the re-emergence of the “anti-social social network” Path, an iPhone app that once allowed you to add only 50 friends (its reincarnation allows 150). The first time it launched, it died a slow death but rose from the ashes over the past few weeks by “borrowing” ideas from successful applications like Facebook (with its own timeline feature) and Instagram’s photo manipulation concept.

The best part is that it allowed you to connect each update via its application with the most popular existing networks – Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare.

It’s early days still but it looks set to be the next iPhone app du jour. Why? Well, it’s because it acknowledges the power of the aforementioned social networks and attempts to survive by complementing them as opposed to competing with them.

If my interpretation of what Path is doing is correct, then 2011 would have been the year that the biggest social networks made their mark and withstood any of its competitors – Google+ and Diaspora (what?).

So where does this leave us as 2012 approaches?

I wouldn’t dare make any predictions, really. At this stage, I feel like we’ve been obsessing over social media so much that we’ve forgotten the largest digital ecosystem in which it resides.

Along that vein, I would say that we can look forward to 2012 as the year where digital users empower themselves. We’ve already seen how social media assisted in protests – either in the Arab world or in many Western countries via the Occupy movement – so much so that Time magazine named the “protestors” as its person of the year.

My vision is that next year, we move forward from there and empower ourselves to be active users of social media by being more conscious of how we engage online, be aware of what we’re “liking” and retweeting and figure out how else we can be more efficient users of social media, than just following the trends.

I won’t predict that for 2012, but I would definitely hope for it.

> First published in What The Tweet, The Star R.AGE on Dec 20, 2011

Free Digital World

niki — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:00:10 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I took the train up to Oxford in Britain along with my classmates to listen to Richard Stallman speak.

Stallman, or RMS as he is known, is a renowned software freedom activist most known for starting the Free Software Foundation in 1985. The FSF is a non-profit corporation, which aims “to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users”.


In his talk, titled “For A Free Digital Society”, RMS spoke about numerous ways in which digital and political masters are using technology to control the general public. He said that in fact, it should be the public who holds the power.

The fact is, people have long become “victims” of technological advancement, as much as we have benefitted from it.

RMS spoke about how authorities in many countries – indeed, even the democratic and liberal ones – have used technology against their people. Governments have used tools like surveillence cameras and used censorship laws to advance their agendas. As a programmer, however, RMS’ biggest “cause” is the battle for free software – free here meaning freedom, as opposed to gratis. He believes that all software should be available to users to edit and distribute, and not just be used.

It is no wonder then that RMS is not a fan of the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, whom he believes produce software and products which are akin to a technological “jail”.

After Jobs’ death recently, RMS wrote on his website, “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill (Gates), not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.”

Obviously, no love lost.


He started his talk by reminding his audience to take the stickers he had printed for them.

One of these stickers was bright yellow and read: “iBad. Bad for your freedom.”

Another one read, “Warning DRM. Products restricts usage or invades privacy.”

DRM, or digital rights management, is another technological advancement that RMS feels jails people. Digital music, movies and books these days usually come with DRM attached which limit the way in which users can access, execute or distribute those works (many of which are usually paid for).

That is why he referred to it as digital restrictions management instead, and cited examples of how some e-readers and music management systems have backdoors which allow the creators to access a customer’s purchased item and manipulate or remove certain content.

RMS constantly changed names of popular products and items because he did not want to help with the marketing – he referred to Apple products as “those i things” and the Amazon e-reader as “the Swindle”.

In today’s social digital world, it is no surprise then that networks like Facebook and Google+ were not spared his wrath. Privacy is high on his list, as is the need to use real names on a users’ profile.

It is hard not to be impressed by such an eccentric but dynamic public speaker, and his passion for a cause he obviously believes in very strongly is admirable. He also made a lot of sense and his points were mostly valid.

Although the things RMS propagated made a lot of sense and he raised many valid points, it was hard to believe that his vision of a “free” world would ever see light. A member of the audience suggested that his were utopian ideals but RMS felt that the strides he had made in his campaign for free software indicated that is a viable goal.

The reality is that it is names like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that the general public will recognise. They are associated with brand names that people trust, which is how the commercial world works. It is thus hard to imagine RMS’ vision of the free software world. Still, there is no reason for the people – you and me – to give in so easily. It never hurts to know what we’re getting into, educate ourselves and use these technologies for its benefits, which include speaking out anytime we feel that technological masters have wronged us.

We can be more aware of our online behaviour, think about the tracks we’re leaving behind and think before we share private and personal information online.

I think the middle ground really is for digital citizens to empower themselves in terms of knowledge and actions.

> First published in What The Tweet, The Star R.AGE on Nov 17, 2011