Brian Pan

I deleted my Facebook account last year and friends have asked why.

Why I liked Facebook:

1. Aggregation and notifications. Facebook did what RSS promised to do but never did. It brought together contact info, blog posts, and photo and video sharing all in one place. This was so convenient, and really, what I wanted all along. And on top of that, Facebook gave me notifications for things I was very likely to be interested in- photos I’m in, notes that friends tagged me in.
2. Private conversations with real life friends. I only care about people that I friend and who I friend back. No spam, no strangers. Just people I have actually met and know.
3. You go where your friends are. There’s no point in writing blog posts that no one is actually reading. Facebook gives me an audience that might actually care about what I have to say.

Why I hated Facebook:

1. Facebook was a rag-tag collection of sharing tools. Photos were resized and compressed to death. Videos were…where are videos now? Under photos? What? Notes were horrendous for anything but plain text and links. Inline photos in notes were never the right size, the right alignment, or have the right padding. Editing and previewing a note was also a painfully slow process, especially since a note never looked right anyway. All of Facebook was slow. Click through 5 photos and the 6th would give you the awesome blue Knight Rider loading animation. Seriously frustrating for as long as I was on Facebook.
2. Facebook was becoming less and less private. Yishan Wong made the case (anonymously on Quora) that this was not a devious Facebook plot, but a response to what the users wanted. Whatever the reason, the result was privacy definitions that were confusing and changing.
3. I felt trapped. Trapped by the tools- I wanted Flickr, Vimeo, and Tumblr. Having everything in one place seemed like a good idea, but what we got were mediocre versions of great sites. I was confused by my desire for privacy but also to share things openly and be heard. I was trapped by the feeling that all my thoughts were captured on Facebook with no way to get them off. And scared of the momentum of Facebook and the thought that everyone would eventually join and I’d really be trapped with all those annoyances.

Deleting my Facebook account seems drastic, even to me, but I was annoyed for so long and I was not finding a way out. In forcing myself to delete my account, I was finally able to liberate my notes and my videos. My photos were for the most part copies of what originated from my iPhoto library (so sorry, only I can see them for now). The Facebook photos were poor quality copies anyway.

I thought I didn’t like Facebook because of privacy issues. That didn’t make total sense to me because the alternatives I turned to were completely public- Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Privacy confusion was one reason I left, but it wasn’t until I joined Google+ that it finally came together for me. You’ll be happy to know my online world makes sense to me again. The pieces are all in order and I’m relatively satisfied with it.

Maybe I’ll even log back into Facebook so I can stalk what my friends in Chicago are up to. I mean, reconnect with old friends. Wait, what’d I say the first time?

Google+ is not Facebook.

It’s confusing because it looks almost exactly like Facebook, but Google has created it for a very different purpose. And my guess is you will use it differently than you use Facebook.

Facebook started as a private friend network. It may be hard to remember what the internet was even a few years ago, but there were a number of things that made Facebook different than other sites. A real email was part of your profile. Existing Yahoo and Gmail contacts were used to invite friends. And you didn’t become Facebook friends until you friended someone and they friended you back. This was unique because a friend on Facebook was not like a MySpace friend or a blog subscriber, but an actual “two-way authenticated,” real life friend. And it was awesome, because with a group of real life friends, you were free to talk and share on the internet as an extension of what you shared outside of the internet.

Prior to that, we deluded ourselves with the awkward practice of journalling our deepest thoughts on blogs to 1) everyone in the world, and simultaneously, 2) no one except two good friends that actually went out of the way to visit your blog and your own mom. The internet was different then. Even if we were on the internet a lot, we generally did not share our whole life. We were not constantly connected like we are now- at work, in the car, standing in line for coffee, at the restaurant.

Facebook grew in popularity, but as the growth stalled, they started to move in the direction they felt the majority of users wanted, which was to open up and make things more public. But users revolted, and privacy has proved to be an impossibly tricky line to move. Users apparently hate having anything change, but also because changing privacy betrays one of the fundamental features of Facebook- private conversations with real life friends. And as groups of Facebook friends grew to include acquaintances, aunts and uncles, and then bands and local restaurants, the line became more and more confused.

And even as Facebook moved users in a more public direction, they were pretty happy not making everything completely public, instead retaining everyone behind Facebook’s login wall. Things that happen on Facebook are for the most part not linkable or searchable from the outside world. If you are not logged in, Facebook’s front page does not have a search field. You need to login or signup to see anything. And even if you are logged in, you need to friend someone to see everything in their profile. This makes sense, though, because otherwise what is the point of friending people?

For Google, it is a different story.

Making everything linkable, indexable, and searchable is very important to Google. While Facebook started as a private site and became more and more public, Google is creating a public place which also allows private conversations. Google+ makes much more sense when you consider it like that. The layout of the page looks like Facebook- but think Twitter, Blogger, or Tumblr. You are sharing to the world (like every other site on the internet).

And what if you don’t want your business all over the internet? That’s where circles come in. Some conversations are meant to be private, and they can be kept private. But circles are not what makes Google different from Facebook; they are the exception that makes Google+ more like Facebook. I think circles will closely mirror the groups of people you want to keep in close contact with. I plan on having a circle to share work related things, one for my close friends, maybe one for the guys I talk stocks with, etc. If I have something to say that’s more specific or private, I will have a conversation in a circle.

By default, though, posting on Google+ is public. I’m not talking about privacy settings or the actual page defaults; you could set everything to private, and share only to your circles. Or share to no one at all! But I think that’s missing the point. This is the profile that will appear when someone searches for your name. It will become a part of your online life, your online persona. Maybe even the front door to your online life. When you meet someone and exchange emails, they’ll get your Gmail address, and with it, your Google+ profile. On Facebook, we were a little blindsided when we realized that potential future employers could see our “hanging out at the bar” pics. If you consider Google+ your default public profile, you have an opportunity to gain more control over what happens when someone searches for you by putting the things you want on the Google profile that is found.

Commenting on Google+ is also sort of public by default. In fact, when you comment on someone else’s post, there’s no indication at all who will see your comment. It could be two people, it could be everyone you’ve ever met and more. Again, this is strange coming from Facebook, but in fact, that’s how the rest of the internet works. If you comment on a blog or a website, your comments are in effect totally public and the “ownership” of the comment becomes shared with the site owner. They can moderate and delete your comment if they choose. Your words are in the comment, but the people who will read the comment are the ones that visit that site. You are responding to the audience the website has built, not your own audience. When you comment on Google+, it will be seen by the audience belonging to the original poster, not your own.

Is moving towards a more public social network a step in the right direction?

I think there will be a place for smaller, truly private interactions. That’s what Beluga and so many similar group messaging apps get right. And there will probably be more startups that do private social networking like Minigroup. But there are already ways to do small, private interactions without a website. Like email. Or a phone call. The power of the internet, though, is being able to reach the whole world. And the opportunity created by the internet is for online social interactions to go far beyond what happens offline. Google is going to be involved at this large, public end of the spectrum that has the biggest scale (and biggest opportunity for profit). It looks like Facebook is heading in that direction as well.

Google’s strength here is that everyone has a Gmail address and many people already have a Google profile created, even before Google+. And Google will make sure profiles feature prominently in searches. Buzz and Wave were flops for Google in part because they pushed the idea of interactions on the internet too far, creating something that was too new and different (and complicated). That’s why Google+ looks just like Facebook, even though it is not at all like Facebook. It’s a step towards the future of the internet, but not a step too far.

Social networking as we have known it is dead. It’s not gone, it’s just that social networking is no longer a website you login to when you want to connect to friends. The reality is it has become everything we do on the web. Social networking used to be what you did on Facebook. Now, we connect to people when we listen to music, try a new restaurant, or look for a job. We’re on Turntable.fm, Yelp, and LinkedIn. We connect to people on our phones with Instagram, Twitter, Uniwar, and Beluga.

The future will allow us to connect in even more ways to even more people. Google+ will become another component of our online lives. The people who will be the most comfortable in the online world are the ones that know how to create and build their public presence, their personal brand, on the social internet.

Comment on this on Google+

The iPhone was announced two years ago in January 2007, and it was released a few months later on June 29 to huge lines in Apple and AT&T stores following weeks and months of anticipation and news article after news article. True to their modus operandi, there was hype. Apple-sized hype.

Has it changed the world? Well, as far as designing phones, maybe. See: Android/G1, BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre. Before the iPhone, there were music phones, touchscreen phones, web browsers on phones. But no doubt that anything that came after January 2007 had to at least be held up once or twice to the new benchmark, the iPhone.

Was it worth all that hype? Were all those people who pre-ordered something they’ve never seen complete nutsos? Ok, you know my answer. But here’s what I think is really incredible: for all the mad hype, the buzz, and the Apple marketing machine, it’s amazing to me that Apple has delivered to not just match, but to far exceed all that hype.

A major iPhone software update, OS 3.0, was released this month bringing many improvements to the iPhone for free. It’s a significant release, not just because of the features it includes, but because it resolves the remaining major critiques of the original iPhone. Missing features like cut & paste, search, MMS, and tethering now round out the capabilities of the iPhone. And as the two-year contracts attached to those first iPhones are now expiring, a quick look back reminds me of how much has changed.

The original iPhone did not have copy/paste, search, push notifications, notes syncing, Find My iPhone, chat, Exchange support, Chinese handwriting recognition, or parental controls. And it didn’t have the App Store. iPhone OS 2.0 brought the ability to download games, Yelp, internet radio, banking, twitter, AIM… an endless list of apps. In one year, more than 1 billion apps have been downloaded. I can now place stock trades on my phone more easily and quicker that I can on my computer- unthinkable in 2007.

Apple delivered a pretty outstanding phone, but they continued to deliver feature after feature over the next two years. It’s pretty safe to say that people who bought an iPhone got more than they paid for, and definitely more than they expected. It’s amazing what seamless software updates can bring. And, nowadays, even cameras and cars get software updates. But I’d be hard pressed to think of another phone, or anything else that can be bought for that matter, that continues to exceed expectations far beyond the point of sale like the iPhone. Apple promises the world and continues to over deliver. Amazing.

Jean-Louis Gassée describes 3.0 as the “Real 1.0”
http://www.mondaynote.com/2009/06/21/the-real-iphone-10/

The original iPhone:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/technology/circuits/27pogue.html

iPhone OS 2.0
http://gizmodo.com/5024078/iphone-20-software-review-forget-3g-its-code-that-counts

iPhone OS 3.0
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/06/hands-on-review-iphone-os-30-chock-full-of-changes.ars

iPhone OS 3.0 features, tips, and tricks
http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/06/how_to_use_best_40_features_of_iphone_3.html http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=715629

Consumer satisfaction
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/04/survey-iphone-ranks-highest-among-smartphone-buyers.ars

The people of Iceland are the latest victims of the global downturn as the economy in Iceland has suffered a collapse. A number of factors including a failure of monetary policy following a banking collapse has led to a soaring 30% inflation, the resignation of Prime Minister Haarde and the government, and the inability to transfer money abroad (and thus the inability for Iceland to import and export to and from their country).

Iceland’s long-term outlook is fortunately positive since it has natural resources and a well-educated workforce so, if nothing else, it will still have the ability in the future to generate real wealth. But for now, Icelanders will have to suffer through inflation, soaring loan payments, and a economy that may need some jump-starting from the world community.

Overview of Iceland’s financial problems
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7658908.stm

Timeline of recent events
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7851853.stm

Country profile
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/country_profiles/1025227.stm

The 2008 Indianapolis Motorcycle Grand Prix was a wet and wild one with the remants of Hurricane Ike pushing all the way into the midwest. The riders practiced and raced all weekend in conditions ranging from dry to rainy and very windy. Forty mile-an-hour gusts threatened to cancel the Sunday race. The MotoGP race started a little late and ran up to lap 21 (the two-thirds point making it a complete race) before it was declared over. It was so rainy and windy that the 250cc class race was cancelled after the Yamaha hospitality tent blew down injuring a race fan.

And we loved every second of the weekend!

Trash bags and umbrellas are useless

Lyle approves!

After the race, Nicky Hayden announced that he’d be leaving Honda to join Casey Stoner on the Ducati Marlboro Team. The season concluded with Valentino Rossi clinching his 8th World Championship. The 2009 season starts in April with a rule change making Bridgestone the single tire manufacturer for the next three years. It can’t come soon enough!