Daily Bits

Internet

Internet Surveillance in America’s Future?

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Talk about Big Brother. As if the capability to run (legal) wiretaps weren’t enough, the United States government is now aiming to set in place systems that would allow them to (legally) wiretap electronic communication such as e-mail and Facebook messages! What the Congress wants is that if the government sends a provider a wiretap order, they should be able to provide the required information.

The implications are huge. Bottom line: anything you send online (whether you’re using a wired connection or a wireless one) can be retrieved and reviewed.

Of course, the average person should not have anything to hide (aside from potentially embarrassing private messages), but the idea that the government can take a look at private information/communication if it wishes is not something that people will welcome any time soon. From a technical point of view, this proposition also poses a lot of risks. According to James X. Dempsey, Vice President of the Center for Democracy and Technology, the government is “asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet. They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

The underlying reason for the government’s plan is that the Internet is being used as a venue for communication by terrorists and other individuals/groups that are threats to society. If they have the ability to monitor and scrutinize this venue, then the world might just be safer for it. While this is indeed a serious concern, I am not so sure that wiretapping is the best solution. The system might just open up a whole new can of worms.

What do you think?

Getting Tired of Facebook? There’s Diaspora.

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In spite of all the complaints that people have been making about Facebook, no one can deny that it still has countless users – and it doesn’t look like the numbers are going to drop anytime soon.  If you don’t have a clear idea about the numbers, you might want to take a look at Infographic Labs’ post on how Facebook is dominating the scene.

However, just because everyone and their mother is on Facebook does not mean that everyone’s all happy and content about it.  That’s just the thing – with the numbers involved, you can’t really expect to make everyone happy.  That’s a fact of life, isn’t it?

Just in case you have serious and legitimate issues with Facebook, then you just might have an alternative pretty soon, and it’s called Diaspora.  With the tag line “The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network,” Diaspora is all about bringing together the users and the platform together.  The idea of Diaspora came up earlier this year, and it immediately received a lot of attention.  However, it wasn’t until last week that the brains behind the idea actually had something concrete to show.

On the 16th of September, the Developer Release of Diaspora was made available.  Before you get all excited and try to create an account, though, you ought to know that it’s simply for developers – people who can deal with the underlying technology.  In layman’s terms, if you are a mere user (like me), then there’s still nothing concrete to be excited about.  Still, once the ones who do know how to program work things out, we ought to have a safer alternative to Facebook.  Don’t hold your breath, though – small chance of seeing it in a “usable” format within the year.

The World of Zynga: Revenue Statistics, Demographics and Platform Analysis

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The colleagues over the Blog Herald analysed the complete Zynga platform and returned some amazing numbers in a great infographic. The startup which was only launched in 2007 is said to be making north of $1 million per day already and has not stopped growing. With more than 360 million players, Zynga has grown to become one of the major players online.
How did the platform grow this fast?

The view the complete analysis of Zynga, an infographic created by Infographiclabs, head over to The Blog Herald.

Twitter Rolls Out New Design

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Have you checked what’s trending on Twitter today?  If so, you couldn’t have possible missed one of the trending topics: #newtwitter.

What’s this #newtwitter buzz all about?  Basically, Twitter is rolling out a new design that will make things easier and more fun for those of us who communicate in 140 words or less on a regular basis.  If you visit the page dedicated to the new Twitter design, I promise you won’t be able to help it – you’ll get excited.  Take a look at the video teaser below.

So the new Twitter is going to have a viewing pane, which will allow users to see videos and photos shared in tweets without having to leave the home page.  That’s obviously handy – who likes leaving a page to see media anyway?  Another development is that users will now have links to @mentions, retweets, searches, and lists just above the timelines, providing easier access as well.

If you think about it, most of these features can be found in other applications that have access to Twitter.  That is precisely the reason why so many Twitter users, including yours truly, use these applications instead of logging in directly to the Twitter web site.  Think TweetDeck.  With the changes, people might just go back to logging in to the Twitter web site.  After watching that video, I think I shall be waiting for my account to reflect the new Twitter look. (Yup, it’s being rolled out gradually, so hold your horses if you’re not seeing any changes yet.)

Well, it IS about time that Twitter did something like this, don’t you think?

Priority Inbox Tips Straight from Google

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Have you used your Priority Inbox yet?  I shall write this post under the assumption that you activated the new Gmail feature the moment you saw that red notification in the upper right corner of your browser.  (I know I did!)

A little over a week since the Priority Inbox was launched, it seems to me that it is not generating a lot of excitement.  I jumped right into the water by activating the feature, and I am still using it.  Yeah, I guess my Inbox does look more manageable now, but somehow, I feel as if I were missing something.  Maybe I am. Maybe you are, too.

Well, the Google team shared five tips to make the most of the Priority Inbox in the Gmail Blog yesterday.  Let’s take a quick look – maybe these tips will fan the flames of enthusiasm again.

  1. Customize your sections. Did you know that you can further tweak the sections so that you will see exactly what you want to see in your Inbox?  You can add sections, indicate labels that you want to be shown, and even control the number of messages to be shown for each section.
  2. Train the system. Truth be told, I have been spending too much time on doing this.  I know I can train the system as I go along, but it’s just a lot of fun going through months’ worth of e-mails and labeling each as important or not.
  3. See the best of your filtered messages.  Okay, this one totally escaped me the first time.  Anyhow, you can override filters so that messages deemed important (but with filters) will still be shown in your Priority Inbox.
  4. Use filters to guarantee certain messages get marked important (or not). More on filters? If ALL the e-mails your boss sends you are important, then simply create a filter that will cause all e-mails from your boss’s address to be marked as important.
  5. Archive unimportant messages quickly.  Too many e-mails in the “Everything Else” section? Just click on the drop down menu and archive shown messages in one fell swoop.

So tell me, do you find any of these tips helpful?

Google Instant for Lazy Information Seekers

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If you’re anything like me, you use Google to search for practically everything.  More so, you probably conduct searches hundreds of times within the day (and that may not be an exaggeration either).  How often have you hit enter/return before you’ve actually completed your search query?  Embarrassingly, that happens quite a lot to me. The good news is that it seems I am not alone in this.

It seems that quite a lot of people encounter the same issue – otherwise, the guys at Google wouldn’t have bothered to come up with Google Instant.  No, it is not coffee.  It’s not even noodles that come in cups.  What Google Instant is: search on the fly.

Imagine typing out your search query, and as you type, Google predicts what you are looking for. The search results will actually come out as you key in your search terms. It’s pretty much like the predictive text input on mobile phones, but I suppose much better. Here’s visual sampling of what Google Instant can do for you.

Pretty neat, huh? Based on the post in the Official Google Blog, the guys had to make use of new technologies in order to make Google Instant work. Some of the highlights:

  1. new caching systems
  2. ability to adaptively control the rate at which results are displayed
  3. optimization of page-rendering JavaScript (this is so that various web browsers can deal with the system)

As with many other new features/products of Google, not everyone has access to Google Instant yet. The same blog post says that it will be available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. Also, users in countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. will get to experience Instant first. Other countries will have access in the following months.