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You know the feeling: opening up your e-mail to find hundreds of messages of varying importance. Some are automated reminders from your favorite sites, some are newsletters you have subscribed to, some are actually from real people trying to contact you, and so on. Separating the wheat from the chaff can be overwhelming much of the time, and even the most carefully crafted filters don't keep up with the ever-changing nature of what's important to you.
Google is hoping to address that problem with a new feature in Gmail called Priority Inbox. Aimed at providing users a way to get through their inboxes as efficiently as possible, Priority Inbox tries to learn your e-mail habits in order to decide which messages are important to you, and move them up to the top where you can see them first.
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Facebook is dominating social media in almost every country where it hasn't been banned, and the six-year old site shows no signs of slowing down. It's creeping across generations, replacing things like the phone book and introducing tools the masses had no idea they needed. It's also indoctrinating the world into adopting the Mark Zuckerberg Values of "openness," "sharing" and "living your whole life on the Internet."
Those values have lead to a cultural movement. But here comes the resistance: a wave of social networking sites that define themselves in opposition to Facebook.
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Privacy Fiends
The most prominent example is Diaspora, the distributed, open-source social network all about privacy and control of your data. Diaspora doesn't cite Facebook by name on its Kickstarter page, where its four founders raised 20 times more money than they asked for. But its founders do refer to "large corporate networks who want to tell you that sharing and privacy are mutually exclusive."
Diaspora's Kickstarter funding page reflects the demand for a Facebook alternative. The site will launch September 15.
Diaspora's founders are followers of Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia and fierce privacy advocate. Facebook is teaching us to sacrifice privacy for convenience, they argue, giving up our information to advertisers who can then "spy on us for free." They resent Facebook's "flipping of switches" that in the past has made user data public without asking permission.
Another site, folkdirect.com, launched in January with a similarly lofty view of privacy: "Your details will never become fodder for targeted advertising campaigns and there are no third party apps to phish your data."
Exclusiveness
Facebook started as a social networking site for college students. Then high schoolers joined, then our parents and our bosses, then our grandparents. Many of its collegiate members were not pleased.
CollegeOnly founder Josh Weinstein remembers how he and his friends were just as anxious to join Facebook as they were for freshman orientation. CollegeOnly launched a social network for "connecting student bodies" last week. When you graduate, you're out. In the promo video, Weinstein turns to the camera and asks, "Don't you wish your social network were college only?" Yet-to-launch mobile startup Scoop has a similar idea.
Maybe age or school-affiliation isn't important, but exclusiveness still is. ASMALLWORLD is an invitation-only social network for "sophisticated" and "influential" people. "Trusted and loyal ASW members who meet certain criteria have the privilege of inviting a limited number of their friends to the network. If you know someone with this privilege, you can ask them to invite you. If not, please be patient and continue to ask around in your own personal and professional circles," the site says.
Multiple personalities
Facebook does let you target what you upload to specific friends. But Facebook doesn't want you to splinter your identity. Throughout its history, Facebook has encouraged users to use their real names, upload their real birthdays and use their real identities to log on to other sites.
Hibe is a yet-to-launch social network based around controlling which personality you project to whom, a concept its creator calls "Social Web 3.0." "We are opening the way for a new social networking experience that goes beyond Facebook," the site says.
Social Networking After FacebookA presentation about forthcoming social network Hibe.com, which emphasizes privacy and fractured online identities.
Just last week we wrote about Facebook competitor Orkut introducing a similar feature with friend groups. The blog post announcing the feature was titled, "You're not always the same person. Why should it be any different on the Web?"
And all the other things that annoy you about Facebook
"Don't you wish your social network were college only?"-CollegeOnly founder Josh Weinstein
Wish Facebook were simpler? Twitter. More professional? LinkedIn. None of these services has achieved a user base anywhere near the size of Facebook's alleged 500 million. But Twitter and LinkedIn each have a sizable following, and many of the just-launched or soon-to-launch anti-Facebooks are tapping into real demand.
There is no single alternative to Facebook. But maybe there could be two. or three. Or hundreds. What do you think - could any of these sites (or a combination of them) ever replace Facebook?
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Roku announced today that it is dropping the prices of its line-up of set-top boxes. The pricing changes come just days before Apple is rumored to be unveiling a major revision to its Apple TV set-top box based on streaming content.
Roku currently sells three models of its digital video player: the basic Roku SD, the mid-range Roku HD, and the top-end Roku XR. The Roku SD is now priced $20 less at $59.99, and the Roku HD and Roku XR are priced $30 less at $69.99 and $99.99 respectively.
The Roku SD only streams in standard definition and is limited to analog output. The Roku HD is the original device, and includes both analog as well as HDMI and digital audio output for streaming up to 720p content. The Roku XR adds 802.11n WiFi and a USB port, and will be able to output 1080p with a firmware update scheduled for later this year. The company noted that most content providers will still be streaming at 720p, but the increased resolution should come in handy for a new USB streaming "channel" currently in testing.
Apple is holding its annual music-related media event this Wednesday (don't miss our live coverage of the announcements), and persistent rumors have suggested that Apple will announcealong with new iPodsa major update to the Apple TV. The device is said to be built around Apple's A4 processor and will run a variation of iOS. The new device also expected to ditch the included hard drive in favor of sufficient flash storage to stream video directly from iTunes. Apple may change the name to "iTV" (the original name before the product launched in 2007), and rumors have pegged the price of the new device at $99.
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We get jet packs, Digg gets punked, and your house is in a movie.
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Your gaming hardware is expensive, used often, and there is no easy way to crack it open if something goes wrong. "The game console industry is hostile to consumers: goliath manufacturers have shipped hundreds of millions of units to consumers with no information on how to maintain or repair them," the folks behind the website iFixit claim. "Console owners are left with few options when their warranties expire, causing many to throw away broken units."
So iFixit has decided to push into a largely untapped market: gamers who want to open their systems, work on the innards, and keep them alive. It's a combination of information and products, mixing how-to manuals with specialized tools and replacement parts. (If you're dealing with PS2 disc read errors, Ars has you covered.)
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Redmond, Wash. - Nintendo announced on Monday that it will
cut the prices on its DSi line of handheld gaming systems, with the basic DSi
to sell for $149, while the DSi XL will now cost $169. The company said the
price tag for its DS Lite model will remain at $129. Through the end of July,
Nintendo DS hardware sales were more than 42.3 million units in the U.S.
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Twitter is killing support for basic user authentication in third-party apps on Tuesday morning. Instead, Twitter will now require all third-party app developers to use OAuth for user authentication. Full Story: |
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