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Monthly Archives: May 2010

Opening Up Facebook

Everyday I log into Facebook, I start to hate it more and more. No, I’m not one of those whiners who complain everytime the layout changes, but it’s just sad to see how much it has deviated from the original goal. In short, the website has turned from a method of communication and interaction between friends to a walled garden filled with ads, applications, and severe privacy concerns. On a default setup of Facebook without filtering anything, it gets difficult with some people to see actual status updates or new photos (AKA actual information about your friends and family) when a few people post floods of updates from applications and other such things.

More importantly though, Facebook is starting to get an attitude that they want to be the center of the internet. Right now, they’re sitting as an entity without a direct competitor, which puts them in more of a dictatorship than anything. As we sit right now, Facebook works because everyone is essentially on Facebook. Major forms of communication only work if the majority of the people you need to contact use it. Take email as an example – email only became a major form of communication once the ability to get an email address. Facebook is popular because of the ease of use to both signup and find people you know on it, but that doesn’t mean it should be given a free pass for some of the policies it has in terms of external parties accessing private data on your profile.

Well, enter Diaspora, a project created by four college students from New York. Their goal is to create an open-source, privacy aware alternative to Facebook as well as creating a unified hub for various other online services as well. What their vision entails is an open source “seed” server concept – you host the data yourself, and allow all the other seeds using Diaspora on the internet to access those seeds as well as you allow them permission to. All your pictures, status’, videos, etc. are stored on your own device, and they’re all encrypted to prevent outside access. In essence, they want to eliminate the middle man and give yourself control of your own data.

The good part of this story is that people seem to be supporting the idea quite strongly. The New York Times wrote a good article describing the project, and they’ve made various headlines around the tech industry already. The public has already pledged over a hundred thousand dollars to the project, which is more than ten times the goal they had set for themselves. However, this plan is far from perfect. As it sits right now, they’re already anticipating a pay-for service that hosts the data online for them so they don’t have to set up a server on their own. That isn’t the answer, and if anything is contradicting their initial vision. Still, if they’re making it open-source from the start, that immediately creates a lot of potential for this system.

What I envision as the best way to do this is to create an external device that you can buy. Create a small hardware box filled with a decent sized hard drive, and have it running as the “seed” and make it easily configurable on the network. With that, your “seed” is independent of your own computer, and you also have a backup of your important data such as family photos, videos, etc. Plus, it keeps the philosophy of “Your data is your own”, which is the entire focus of the project.

This is still early on in the project, and I think the funding and public support is enough to prove that there is a need for a Facebook replacement, as well as an online revolution to bring our data back to us. I’m proudly going to be supporting Diaspora from the start, and will encourage as many people as possible to do it. Technology and internet is now too advanced for people to be getting away with taking people’s data hostage, and it’s projects like this that will start that revolution. It may not replace Facebook, but even getting noticed and bringing its flaws out in the public eye could be enough of a victory for it.

To get more information about Diaspora, be sure to follow them on Twitter (@joindiaspora), as well as their website.  To donate to the Diaspora project, visit their page on Kickstarter.  Be sure to spread the word!

Dream List of Endangered Species

In light of all this talk about HTML5 and new standards for web, I got to thinking: there are standards that we use now that are theoretically really outdated, and have vastly improved replacements that simply aren’t being adopted. So, in an attempt to create some awareness of some better alternatives to common file types and standards, I’m presenting my wish list of file types/formats that deserve a funeral sooner than later.

*.MP3 – Compressed Audio

Call me a snobby audiophile, but having been brought up in a radio environment my entire life and working it in now has made me hate compressed audio. When MP3s first came out, hard drive space was at a premium, and portable flash storage was even more expensive. Heck, I remember buying my first MP3 player, a 128MB Rio Cali, and loving the fact that I could listen to as many tracks as a regular CD in my pocket. Of course, that was back in 2002 or so.

Flash forward to today. Terabyte hard drives are under a hundred dollars Canadian. Average download speeds for files are about 1MB/sec. Flash storage is abundant and cheap. Still, we’re using a lossy audio compression format from fifteen years ago. Why? Well, the long story short is that the software/hardware side of music players don’t support it, and that record companies aren’t allowing stores to sell songs in a lossless format. However, I’ll cover the lossless audio debate in another post. Main thing is, there are better ways to listen to audio than listening to it compressed.

*.GIF – Animated Graphics

Ah, my old nemesis GIF files. These files go all the way back to 1987, and even talking about them just reminds me of Geocities pages all over the internet. These files were intended to be incredibly portable, and use as little bandwidth as possible. This was perfect for the birth and spread of the internet generation, when online storage and bandwidth was at a premium. Looking at a GIF file today though, especially the ones where people take a movie clip and convert it to an animated picture, you’ll notice some serious posterization. That’s the 256 color palette limitation causing that, and there’s no real way to fix that (There is apparently a workaround, but it isn’t supported by all browsers).

I was actually unaware of this until I did some research, but there is actually a new standard for animated graphics out there – animated PNG files (APNG). These files are exactly what they sound like, which means that they support 24-bit images with 8-bit transparency. In other words, these files will look as beautiful as most PNG files do, except allow animation as well. And, as icing on the cake, any program that doesn’t support the animation will simply display the first frame of the image. Seems like a great replacement, right?

Well, things are never as nice as they seem. Only two web browsers right now support APNG files (Firefox and Opera), and the list of image editors that support the files are even smaller. With Adobe’s Flash such a common tool for doing what GIF did, as well as allowing user interaction for things like banner ads, there hasn’t been much interest to push the APNG standard. Still, maybe if Apple gets their way of a Flash free internet we could see this becoming more common and supported.

*.RAR – File Compression

I’ve never liked RAR files. In a sea of various data compression methods, the relative proprietary-ness of RARs doesn’t appeal to me at all. Sure, it may compress multimedia files a little bit better due to the different algorithms it uses, but you only really see it used a lot in torrents anyways. And believe me, there’s nothing more annoying than getting a multi-file RAR file and having to deal with it once it’s all downloaded.

There actually haven’t been many advancements in file compression in recent years due to the lack of a need of it. In reality, the only good use of archives is to contain multiple files for easy transfer, not necessarily to even save disk space or bandwidth. The newest entry in the market is really 7zip, and it actually exceeds RAR in every way except multimedia compression. Well, with multimedia anyways, you aren’t going to see any substantial compression rates anyways since the video/audio is usually already compressed into a lossy format. You aren’t gaining anything other than creating extra stress on your CPU, creating extra files, and annoying whoever you’re sending the file to!

*.MSI – Windows Installers

Doing some further reading, it looks like they fixed a lot of problems with MSI files in Windows Installer 4.0, but I stand by the lack of need for it. Installation programs are easy to create by my understanding, and they can do a lot more than any Windows Installer package can.

My biggest problem with these files is the fact that Windows really doesn’t deal with them as executable like they arguably should. If I need to install a program that’s contained in an MSI file at work on another person’s computer, I can’t just right-click it and select “Run as other user” to elevate the levels immediately. I need to either use the ‘runas’ command to open up a terminal window or an explorer window to start installation as an administrator. I guess this is arguably a bug in Windows XP, but there’s no good reasons I can find as to why this is better than a self-contained EXE.

*.wps/*.wks – Microsoft Works Documents

Dear Microsoft, there is absolutely no reason you should be including a proprietary file format inside a program when you also include the ability to read and export Microsoft Office files in it too! All that does is create issues whenever people start to send these files out as attachments, and I get the phone call from a coworker complaining that they can’t read the file.

Then again, I’ve always thought Microsoft Works was the stupidest piece of software available. The only time I’ve seen people have the software is when it’s pre-installed on a computer, and honestly considering there are a few free alternatives to Microsoft Office that do everything Works can, except better, I’ve always uninstalled it on any PC I’ve touched. OpenOffice.org is a much better alternative, and it is more of an office suite than Works is anyways.

This is the one I can guarantee will be extinct in the future though. With Office 2010, they’re creating a free, ad-supported version to replace works. And honestly, even I’d take the ads over Microsoft Works any day of the week, and I’m really not a fan of ad-supported software.

Any other file types that you hate dealing with?