lehrblogger

Aruba's Instant On line has AP's that are similarly-priced to Ubiquity's, although they don't have an offering like the UDM Pro.

Yeah, I understand. I was speculating about possible changes to social norms and body postures in response to recording technology like Glass. As an alternative to an indicator light, maybe Glass-wearers will learn not to look at other people at all, so as not to give the impression that they are recording. Similarly, perhaps there are ways that we held our pre-camera cell phones that would now imply recording, so we've all subconsciously learned to hold our new phones differently.

In other words, it could be a lack of obvious physical gestures that indicates we are not recording, rather than the presence of obvious physical gestures that indicate we are recording.

A world in which we don't 'point' our heads at strangers is definitely weird and possibly undesirable, but interesting to think about.

Aren't the mobile photo sharing and messaging markets both large and established? Past technologies that have made those tasks slightly faster or easier have seen widespread adoption, and it seems possible the same thing could happen with Glass.

Thanks for the link, I'll watch some of these. I agree the viruses/etc are a serious issue, and I'm not sure if I'm more worried about the first virus for Glass, or the first viruses for self driving cars and Amazon delivery quadcopters ... :)

I don't see these two futures as necessarily incompatible, and could certainly use more time alone in cabins. But sometimes it's better to both relax and be productive with other people, and technology is good for removing the constraint that those people be in the same place. Maybe Glass won't be a device on which we receive minute social updates, but it can still be useful for the same reasons a telephone is useful. Maybe it could even have a similar busy signal, so you're not interrupted if you're already talking to someone.

I think the 'worth' of a picture depends on the circumstances – people take many more pictures than they did twenty years ago, now that we don't need to get the film developed – and a further simplification of the process might lower the threshold further. A pretty sunset is a pretty sunset, but the pretty sunset from someone you love halfway around the world is something different. An interesting thing about Glass is that it minimizes the duration of the interruption needed to both send and receive that sunset.

Our existing mobile devices can be used in similar creepy ways, but we've learned to discern between the postures people use for taking photos with their phones, and their postures for doing everything else with their phones. We certainly pay an "attention tax" to maintain an awareness of nearby devices, but we've gotten over the creepiness.

It's possible that we'll learn similar patterns for Glass. While we won't know if the device itself is recording, we might still be able to guess based on where the wearer is looking and how quickly they are moving. On the flip side, Glass wearers might also change their postures and habits so as to avoid matching these newly-learned patterns.

Was the site down? It's hosted on S3 and served by CloudFront, so I'm not sure what might have been wrong. Thanks for the cache link, though!

I disagree with etanz's post, and think it makes sense for Snapchat to make this feature more accessible (as others have pointed out, profiles have existed on the web for a long time).

In particular, the people we communicate with is not "one of our tightest guarded secrets," especially among the teenage demographic. The term 'bff', for example, has meaning because teenagers like to declare their relationships publicly. Of course our friendships define who we are, and we use those friendships to express our identity in the same way we use fashion to express our identity.

I doubt a large part of Snapchat's usage is for extramarital affairs and the like, and the company is probably happy to make the app less useful for that, and more useful for communication between friends. By making the top friends visible, if user A looks at user B's profile and sees herself as third in the list, and is jealous of the people in the first two spots, then the best thing for user A to do about it is... send more snaps.

I live in NYC now and have spent enough time in SF, MV, and PA to know what it would be like to live there. It’s certainly expensive in Manhattan, but there are a number of advantages:

* I don’t need a car. This has been as freeing for me as for others.

* I don’t worry at all about logistics, ever. The subways run all night, taxis are ubiquitous, and walking is safe and pleasant.

* Everything is close by, so I don’t need to worry about meetups at the opposite end of the bay.

* I can find good food nearby regardless of the time of day. This city never fully sleeps, which is great because you can set your own schedule.

The city is also distracting, but after a while you get used to it and build up the self-discipline to stay in and work. I’m not convinced this is any harder here than it would be in any other place that I had friends.

I'm very late to this thread, but I think this suggests perhaps the biggest problem that Facebook has:

Because the act of 'defriending' someone has such strong negative social connotations, it will continue to be very uncommon, and as a result the number of friends any given user has is increasing monotonically. I've had Facebook for years, and by friend count has steadily increased and is now nearing 900. The users who only have 100 friends now will eventually be in the unmanageable and uncomfortable position of having 1000 friends, and by that point I won't be surprised if my count is approaching 1500.

Facebook certainly seems to want everyone to have as many friends as possible (note the friend suggestion features), so it's only a matter of time before everyone is presenting themselves to such a large auditorium.

I think Facebook is beginning to have systemic user privacy/comfort issues resulting from their persistence in oversaturating their social graph. yan is right in that only a tiny minority of their userbase (such as us) really cares about this right now, but I think that in this case our concerns are leading indicators for those of the rest of the Internet-using population.

I don't think that any site that tries to combine the entirety of the social graph with contextually agnostic personal content will ultimately be successful - in other words, no one wants a site where everyone they've ever met can see what they're doing all over the Internet, and this is what Facebook seems intent on creating. It's more than just a pure privacy concern (where privacy means restricted access to personal information) - there's also filtering issues, with my 'friends' being exposed to/spammed by content I create that simply isn't meant for them.

For what it's worth, I'm also actively working on an alternative to Facebook, which will be a tool for users to partition their online social network to match their real-world social contexts, and then use those partitions to manage their 'friends' lists on the myriad other sites where people already share content (Flickr, Foursquare, Vimeo, Twitter, and so on).

I've been thinking a lot about how tags might be used to organize friends/contacts. Ideally I'd have a way to tag everyone I knew, perform basic set operations with the tags, and then synchronize the resulting lists with a variety of social websites. So I could be "friends" on a new site with, say, my 'friends among political junkies' and 'friends from college' but none of my 'friends from work' who were not also 'close friends'.