Interesting Links for 1-7-2011

[andrewducker]

• Has spam become economically infeasible?
  (tags: technology email spam)
• Why ordinary people won’t use Google+ (and why that thrills me to no end)
  (tags: socialnetworking google)
• The freakonomics of smut: Does it actually cause rape?
  (tags: porn rape)
• Penal reform: Where is Labour?
  (tags: labour law crime prison uk)
• Grampian Police hail body-worn camera success. I approve!
  (tags: TransparentSociety video law police)

Comments

[birguslatro]

Ordinary people use gmail, so those ordinary people may colonize Google+. And from Google's POV, a social network of ordinary people is much more valuable than one of geeks.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Why Yo Momma Won’t Use Google+

Friend of mine got added by his granny already. I've not got an invite yet myself.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I'm feeling miffed* about lack of an invite. Apparently they're choosing people to invite who have extensive social graphs. I have a moderate-to-large social graph ... just not on Google services. So far as Google knows, there's less than a dozen people who followed me on Buzz and maybe twice that who were contacts on Wave.

* As in, not actually miffed but pretending to be for rhetorical purposes.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I'm actually miffed as I do work with the social research crowd so the more influential/well-connected researchers already have invites. It's a field of research where you don't look like you're good at it if you're not well-connected.

[andrewducker]

I'll send you an invite if I can tonight!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Heh. I can see that.

I need to be able to brief people about new social technologies, so in theory I ought to be also irked. But the general background info around is more than enough to blag it for now - I have more than enough to say more than this about it, which is all most people need for my job purposes. And also, I'm slightly unusual in my field for believing that it's important for me personally to actually use and understand the stuff I'm going on about.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It gets tiresome when women past a certain age (55? 60?) are used as the symbol of People Who Don't Use Whatever New Thing and Who Therefore Need Not Be Addressed. Also, I haven't heard whether resistance to new tech is more male or female, though I'm sure there's an age factor.

Google+ might be something I like if people end up using it for conversation more than diaries, but I already use html in most places and markdown at Less Wrong, and I am Not Pleased that Google+ is doing something that's kind of like Markdown but not quite.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Indeed... it's lazy journalism. 10 years ago the article would likely have been "why yo mamma will never use email" or "why you mamma will never send texts". Maybe this particular technology will not catch on but arguing from the point of view of some group designated too old and too female to understand it patronising and adds nothing to the debate.

There is a point that some technology ends up remaining "geeks only" (or dies because of this).

I haven't heard whether resistance to new tech is more male or female, though I'm sure there's an age factor.

Although social networking technology tends to have more female users my guess would be that the real early adopters are more often male (simply because it's a geek demographics).

[andrewducker]

You'll notice I changed the headline when I posted it, because I didn't like it at all.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I think the standard form has stably been "not your grandmother's", and occasionally "not your mother's". The only thing that's changed is that I've moved into the age range myself, so I've gotten picky about it.

I haven't seen the dialect version, but that probably just means we're reading different things.

I think the earliest adopters are probably mostly male, but what I'm looking at is the very late adopters or non-adopters.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Why ordinary people won’t use Google+ (and why that thrills me to no end)

Hm. Maybe. I mean, on the one hand, predicting that a new social networking platform will fail because of the network effect is hardly a bold claim. Almost every such attempt does fail for exactly that reason, before even getting out of the planning phase. On the other hand, this is google -- google+ is famous after two days. Was facebook famous after two days?

Basically, the killer feature I'm looking for is "not treating my privacy like a pinata". Facbeook have shown they can't, won't and don't do this. Google, while still with some awful bits on its record, is streets ahead, in that it appears to actually care about the problem at all, rather than just updating their privacy statement to reflect "whatever we want to do now".

The question to me is, do normal people care about that at all? I don't think they do much, but I think they do a bit. "Posting pictures of me in compromising position X so my friends can see and my boss can't" is not exactly a niche usage (?)

Grampian Police hail body-worn camera success. I approve!

Yeah. I appreciate why it may be stressful for the police (and maybe people talking to them) for every encounter with the police to be monitored, but I think it's a much better trade off than the current one.

[andrewducker]

Yes. If it prevents the police from breaching the law, while also capturing more evidence to expedite trials then it's great news all round!

[steer.livejournal.com]

On the other side of that coin, google wave was famous after two days and google wave invites were treasured and begged. It was a great technology IMHO. It's just that nobody used it.

[andrewducker]

I agree it was great. But it was largely great for purposes I couldn't use it for.

On an individual level I rarely need to keep IMs, mix in files and emails, convert it into a document, and share it with a bunch of people.

For work purposes this would be _awesome_.

If I used Wave for work I'd be out the door faster than you could blink.

Shame, really :->

[steer.livejournal.com]

If it had become successful enough to be an email replacement with extras I think it would already be great. (Why use email when you can use a wave?) But not enough people used it.

For work discussions it was great -- we had one or two technical discussions on there with some diagrams and links, an agreed area for "our best understanding of this" -- but the novelty wore off, people forgot to check it. I've still got some archived discussions on there.

It would be superb for that kind of "shall we go to the pub tonight" email discussion which unnecessarily generates 20 emails (and some bugger always changes the header half way through and mucks up threading).

it was largely great for purposes I couldn't use it for.

In the end, absolutely this. Few enough people used it that you couldn't use it as a drop in replacement for email with features and a live discussion option.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Me and mates from work did try using Wave for work, and it didn't work (for us).

Google Docs now does what we were trying to do only much better. Partly because it keeps a clear channel separation between chat and the thing you're collaboratively working on. But more fundamentally, because it makes it much easier to focus on what the final object you're producing actually is, and whether it makes any sense yet.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Grampian Police hail body-worn camera success. I approve!

Whoa. I'm having one of those 'mobile phone=Star Trek communicator only better' moments.

I'm starting to strongly suspect that antipope has rather influential contacts. Hmm. Or well-placed fans. Hmm. Or is simply good at his job. Which is, perhaps, the direction that we'd be pointed in by Occam's RAZR.

[andrewducker]

Much though I appreciate autopope, this predates him. David Brin had this kind of tech in "Earth", and followed it up with The Transparent Society:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent_pr.html

Of course, there it wasn't just the police who had cameras on them, pretty much everyone did.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Duh, wrong username, sorry.

Absolutely, David Brin was all over this long before autopope. And there's shades of Heinlein's Fair Witnesses in the mix too, and doubtless others I could think of if I were a better sf fan.

But having that story and Rule 34 hit my awareness in a short space of time pinged my pattern-matching algorithm hard. Almost as if the Grampian Police had been hired on a publicity retainer. :-)

Of course, there it wasn't just the police who had cameras on them, pretty much everyone did.

Indeed. And it's not just the police who have cameras on them now, as incidents from Rodney King onwards have shown.

It's not quite ubiquitous, yet, but it's really widespread. These days, any demo will be absolutely bristling with cameras on bothall sides and none.

The mobile/communicator thing I'm having is how an sf idea that had cool elements to it turns out to be even cooler when deployed in real life.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see someone investigate the link between internet availability and lonely-guys-who-might-otherwise-have-gone-on-to-rape-someone actually getting consensual sex.

[andrewducker]

That _is_ an interesting one. I know that for a lot of introverted people the internet has been a complete lifeline.

I had very close to no friends from the ages of 11-17. I'd have killed to even know there were other geeks out there!

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

That article on Google+ makes me want to avoid it. "We geeks..." indeed. I quite enjoy the company and conversation of "normal people". Hell, I probably am one.

My suspicion is that this is exactly the sort of reaction Google want - create a buzz about the product from "geeks" who feel honoured enough to have been sent an invite, then release it to the wider population later.

I'll stick with facebook I think. And livejournal. And twitter.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that bit on Google+ is an utter brain fart.
My Space lost 94% of its market cap in 6 years.
Microsoft has been irrelevant for a while. It hasn't gone away, or even shrunk noticeably, but it has as much power to rock our world as IBM does.

Why should Facebook be any different? I don't know if Google+ will be what eats its lunch, but why not? (With good features and a good API, I bet it could.)
Heck, I've been asking for a year what "the kids" will be using in four years when Twitter is for old people . . .

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

The freakonomics of smut: Does it actually cause rape?

If smut leads to rape, you all better come visit me when I'm in prison, given how much of the stuff I write.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Ho ho ho, those sheeple won't use google+ it'll be a safe place for us self-evidently superior nerds who secretly don't like facebook because it has people who talk about sport and things that we saw on reddit like days ago

I'd rather be on a site like facebook, rather than a social network for people who read slashdot, or whatever the modern equivalent is, if it's not the nerdy place to be any more.