The proprietary chat gig is up-- finally!

With Facebook's announcement that they are moving forward to enable cross-platform chat using XMPP/Jabber the chat wars are effectively over. With Facebook and Google on the XMPP. bandwagon it's just a matter of time until the proprietary services either switch or become totally irrelevant. It's about time this happened. This was the world's biggest no-brainer: Using Facebook Chat via Jabber.

Since the launch of Facebook Chat, we've received a lot of positive feedback from users about being able to connect instantly with their friends on Facebook. With Chat fully launched and growing steadily, we've started working on more new features to enhance the Chat experience.

Right now we're building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. In the near future, users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook.

The myths about youth and technology

The Berkman Center at Harvard has an interesting wiki discussion started concerning the myths about youth and their online presence: Digital Natives:

Myth #1: The online world presents a wholly new and completely different set of issues for youth we must address.

Many of the issues cropping up with children and young people playing, being, and living online – from cyberbullying, to information evaluation, to online civic engagement - are the same as age-old offli--e issues, however filtered through a new medium with new possibilities, and new considerations.

Good stuff! It sounds like the Berkman@10_conference is going to be really interesting. I wish I could be there-- but I've been way too busy. I do hope to attend some through their Web casts.

And yes, the wiki is yet another MediaWiki site.

The seedy side of Scrabulous that I'd totally missed

I'm feeling really stupid, that as the Commissioner of the Twitterverse Scrabulous World Championship Series, that I didn't know that Scrabulous had a secret side. You can imagine my shock when I come to learn that it has this whole other "purpose": How a stuffy board game became became a sleazy internet pickup joint:

Because on its surface, Scrabble is no Twister. Its board is a prosaic, melancholy wash of pallid blues, reds and grays. Opportunities to maneuver are restrictive (no saucy diagonals allowed). And scoring is banal — most letters are worth an underwhelming one point. Most mood-killing of all, the game is slow and it's long — a ten-minute wait between turns isn't uncommon. Combine a fireside game of Scrabble with a bottle of Chianti, and you and your date will be asleep before the first triple-word score.

This monotonous pace, however, is perfect for an online game of smutty Scrabulous. For many players, once the lewd dialogue begins, it supercedes the game itself. Long stretches of time between turns mean ample chance to hone one's dirty talk. "I don't think people really pay attention to the game once the flirting has begun," says Jack, a serious player with an impressive rating of 1,500+. He often seizes upon his opponent's distraction to win the game and further increase his rank. And he appreciates the metronomic rhythm that regulates and compliments the natural back-and-forth of verbal seduction. "The excitement comes from the fact that you have to take turns to flirt: your turn, my turn. You have to wait until the other person has completed their turn before you get in your next line."

I had no idea. My in-game chats have been restricted to things like, "nice play", and "where you been?" I'd been living under the "comfy" assumption that Scrabulous was all about the game. One should never be surprised when it comes to the internets. Live and learn.

DO NOT filter for me... I'll do it myself please

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting read on Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media:

If there's one thing to be learned from social media tools, it's that these services were not made to interact with one another. Complaints are rolling in and heated discussions are taking place about the noise levels within social media platforms. Here's a look at why noise levels are high and why filtering should be the next step for social media platforms.

Of course, the noise itself contains lots of valuable information. The article acknowledges this; one person's noise is another's gem. But then it goes where all who run these types of services want to go. They want to be my intelligence:

Instead of being able to freely add whatever service you wish, some users like myself are taking into account what others may consider noise on certain services as a courtesy to members. In essence, you are becoming our own filter. You may refrain from important other services for fear of being labeled as "noisy". With better filtering options, users can use these services to their fullest extent without becoming a nuisance to others or missing the benefits of aggregating all of their accounts.

The obvious question raised by this is where the filtering should take place? Personally, I want to do my own filtering. I want to filter on the way out-- I don't want others filtering for me on the way in. If every social media service begins to add filtering then a lot is going to be missed. I don't filter to block information. I use it more proactively-- I use it to surface ideas. If the information isn't there in the first place, because someone has used some "wisdom of the crowds" algorithm to filter for me, then it can't be surfaced. Filtering is an essential information literacy skill. I've often said that everyone needs to know a scripting language for just this reason. This is changing somewhat with the new lighter-weight tools to help people filter on their own: Yahoo Pipes being but one example.

Aggregation is aggregation. Filtering is filtering. When it comes to filtering, I want to do it myself using my own tools. Aggregators should not try to help us too much, and it shouldn't be done site by site.

Chroma key and Second Life machinima

I've spent a fair bit of time over the last couple of weeks learning about creating chroma key video. I've been really slammed of late, and most of my play time has been carved from when I might normally have been sleeping. My goal was to mix some Second Life machinima with some real-world video. It's been fun to learn, and where my first effort is rather trivial, I did learn some things that I will be able to put to use on more practical projects in the future.

I started off trying to create this using green backgrounds. I basically created a big box in the sky with several 10x10 panels that I had turned green. It was a lame attempt to emulate green screen production techniques. The problem was that the side walls and the floors, even though they were covered with the same color of green, were presented in Second Life with shadows. So I was dealing with two different shades of green. Where Final Cut could handle the two different colors it was still mostly a pain to have to use two different filters. There was also a lot of green in the avatar's skin, and after playing with the skin color it was still difficult to get good results. I tried several things to get around the problem with the raw captured video. I tried completely closing in the box from any ambient light (is there such a thing in Second Life?), but that didn't solve the problem either. What finally worked was to not use green at all, but to use black. It was too easy!

Here's my video... I'm afraid to publicly admit how long I spent making this. It took a long time! I am gradually getting faster and smarter with Final Cut. It's been a lot of fun, but I still have a long ways to go.

Scrabulous World Championship skitch 2

Here's another skitch of the World Championship finals. The latest score is @hooeyspewer 269 to @debcoates 201 with 29 tiles left to play. Unlike the Democratic primary-- it's still too close to call.

Giving thanks to Steve Ballmer

I made a killing in an Inkling prediction market this past weekend when the MicroHoo talks went down the tubes: Will Microsoft announce a successful buyout of Yahoo! in 2008?. I started shorting the deal last week at $84, and just kept buying all the way down.

I have no idea how the corporate world works, and how you are supposed to consummate these sorts of deals. For all I know it's against the law to talk to the buy-out target before the fact. Regardless, I think the whole notion is stupid. Think how much better this would have gone in a transparent world? Where Steve sends Jerry an email, or even better-- a tweet, and says, "Can we talk? I want to share an idea we've had with you." Then they get together over a beer, "discover" that they have pretty different cultures, that there are significant barriers, and that maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all.

Maybe things just aren't done that way in business-- how would I know? We don't deal in numbers that big in academia. I do know that a little transparency might have led to a whole lot more trust, and if the deal couldn't be made at least they wouldn't be facing such a brutal and very public failure.

Regardless, their failure catapulted me into the top 100 traders at Inkling, and on to the leader-board for the week. And for that I am thankful!