August 2011 Archives

The new social networking site Google Plus is nibbling away at Facebook's lunch, and in response Facebook today announced what should be easier-to-invoke, per-post privacy controls that do for FB what Circles does for G+ ... in some sense anyway.

I think the reality, as I've discussed with people in my Circles in Google +, is that nobody really understands exactly how Circles work in G+, or how the privacy controls (and the actual privacy or lack thereof) work in FB.

Complexity, continual changes, poor documentation, and did I say complexity? It all adds up to users not knowing what's going on. And that can't be good.

What works, I think, is allowing the services to be used in a simple or increasingly complex way if you wish. I see Twitter this way. You can tweet, gain followers, follow others, and that's it. What makes it complicated are lists of people you follow, @ replies, retweets, direct messages ... but you don't have to make it complicated if you don't want to.

Similarly with Google +, if you only want/need to communicate with a few people, and they you, it's easy to understand. But when you get dozens or hundreds of people in dozens of Circles, and everybody's sharing posts across their own Circles, the whole thing starts to make our collective brain hurt. Or at least my uncollective brain.

You've heard the saying, give a hacker a fish and he'll eat for a day, but screw up his OS and he'll dig a hole and make you jump in.

Such is the case with ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion:

Having lived with the pain of Vista pre-SP1, I can tell you that the problems currently facing Apple with Lion are worse. Much worse.

Others report no problems with Lion, so it seems some hardware responds better than other configurations. At $29 for the upgrade, at least the only potential pain is in time and productivity ....

While The New York Times cites 400,000 users who are paying for its content in one form or other as evidence that its new paywall policy is working, Mathew Ingram of GigaOM isn't begging but is differing in its opinion of the enterprise:

... the biggest knock against the paywall is that it has virtually nothing to do with actually taking advantage of the digital world in any concrete way. It's just charging people nickels and dimes for their paper, the way the NYT and other newspapers have for a century and a half or so. In that sense, it's not really a strategy at all; it's more like a line of sandbags designed to shore up the print business and squeeze as much money out of it as possible as it declines. A wise move? Perhaps. Something to get excited about? No.

I don't get over to Lifehacker all that often, but I decided to drop by today, and I was surprised by the way the site works.

Through the magic of Javascript, you navigate through stories on the right side of the screen, and they appear on the left.

For those disturbed by same, there used to be a "traditional view" button at Lifehacker. That button is now gone, as far as I know.

I'm ready to embrace the new functionality. It looks good. It works.

I was looking for large sites that use Drupal as their CMS and came across New York Observed (which lives at Observed.com). I remember it as a high-profile "newspapers like Drupal" convert.

Not anymore.

Observed.com is now a WordPress site, as WP parent Automattic and Yahoo's The Cutline report.

One thing I noticed was a rather nice photo-gallery app that could very well be an off-the-shelf WordPress plugin. Of course any photo slideshow app that doesn't use Flash is more than OK by me.

While not related to Drupal, other recent defections to WordPress include:

• BoingBoing, whose Movable Type-to-WP transition I wrote about previously.

• The Bangor Daily News, which did a whole lot of work in order to publish online via WordPress with the help of Google Docs for copy creation and flow. (Check out the dev site for way more detail.