Don’t Believe Everything You Read on Twitter

Someone caused a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter today after he or she tweeted that California’s controversial Proposition 8 had been overturned by the State Supreme Court, crediting @LATimes. Slight problem–it wasn’t true.

The court has taken the constitutionality of the amendment under its consideration, so it wasn’t unreasonable to believe that the LA Times somehow gotten the scoop on its decision. That is what just one one careless person came to believe.

The culprit tweeter linked a story written dated May 16, 2008, when the court overturned a law barring same-sex marriage, because it violated the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.

Any “followers” who clicked the link and examined the date on the story would have discovered that, but many chose to not take the extra step to verify what they read, and reflexively re-tweeted the “news.” Word inevitably made it way back to the LA Times’ own Twitter feed where its 19,700-plus followers began to see it– a perfect storm of misinformation.

There is a degree of trust built into the social mesh of Twitter, because people select who they want to follow. That trus does not substitute the fact that most people that blog about news on Twitter are not journalists, and do not have editors verifying their work. Twitter is place to find news, but it is not a news source.

Another root cause is the at-a-glance, all-the-world in 140 characters, aspect of it all. People consume information rapidly, and can react to something that they see on Twitter without thinking. Even friends make mistakes, and in this case, friends of friends propagated that mistake.

There are consequences when just anyone can post something online –consequences that could affect people’s lives, reputations, and even their livelihood. That is why print publications have editors, and television networks have guards placed outside of newsrooms. People’s emotions and legal rights were needlessly toyed with today.

5Words for Friday, May 15th 2009

Special late Friday afternoon edition!

Facebook to launch video chat?

iPhone SlingPlayer: pricey, selling well.

Rumor: iPods Nano with cameras.

Zappos: from shoes to electronics.

iPhone 3.0: background apps permitted?

New BlackBerry Storm sans SurePress?

Sony Pictures CEO hates Internet.

Netbooks aren’t about to expire.

More on Thursday’s Google outage.

Shazam iPhone app sparks lawsuits.

GPS System May Start Deteriorating Next Year

The GPS system is beginning to show its age, and like some of the elderly among us, may begin losing its way beginning in 2010. This is due to the aging of the satellies themselves, some of which have been in operation for close to 20 years.

According to the Government Accountability Office, the Air Force is beginning to fall behind in targets to replace aging equipment. Part of this has to do with the fact that some of these projects have not had decent oversight, while others have gone well over budget.

The next scheduled lauch of a GPS satellite is in November. This would be more than three years behind schedule, the GAO reports. According to its research, the probability of keeping all 24 satellites in the air drops below 95 percent next year, and down to 80 percent in the following two years. If these problems continue long term, the probability of a a fully-functional GPS system in 2017 is only 10 percent.

As these satellites fail, GPS will become less and less accurate as a result.

What may need to be looked at now is international cooperation. The EU is busy building Galileo, and Russia and China are also working on their own GPS system.

Of course, since GPS has a military use as well, the US Government may not be all too excited to let overseas systems in. However, if we can’t fix our own problems here, it may be the only viable option.

Car-Warranty Robocallers: The Jig is Up. Finally.

I don’t claim to be an expert on religious theory, but I am reasonably confident that there’s a special circle in Hell reserved for the sleazeballs behind those automated cell-phone calls that attempt to trick you into thinking that your car warranty is about to expire as an excuse to sell you a new extended warranty.

I’ve lost track of how many of them I’ve received, but my blood pressure shoots up every time I answer my phone and discover that it’s not only a robocall, but a lying, cheating robocall. (They’re dialing randomly, of course: My car warranty lapsed long ago, and I’ve heard from friends who don’t have drivers’ licenses who get these spamcalls.) To make matters worse, some of the calls are not from warranty peddlers, but rather from identity thieves.

So it’s heartening to hear (via Daring Fireball) that the FTC is finally cracking down on two companies behind the scam. I don’t, however, understand why it took so long for the agency to take action when this has been going on for eons, or why it’s apparently responding to the fact that New York Senator Charles Schumer received a warranty robocall last week. Thirty thousand Americans who hold no elective office had already griped about the calls–I woulda hoped that the FTC would have stepped in by the time, oh, let’s say the five thousandth complaint had been lodged.

If thirty thousand people were moved to file complaints, who knows how many have received the calls? The two companies the FTC is acting against apparently made $10 million in ill-gotten gains, but their biggest crime may have been wasting untold thousands of hours of time of the people who received the calls and had to listen to ‘em. Even those who, like me, got really good at hanging up three or four words into the recorded scam.

I Wish That You’d Pay for Web Content. But Would You?

Imagine someone spending fifteen years furiously digging themselves into a deep, dangerous hole…and then bitterly complaining about the fact that he or she is trapped at the bottom of a deep, dangerous hole. That’s the situation with today’s media industry..of which, of course, I count myself as a member. Starting in the mid-1990s, publishers began to give away content for free on the Web, a decision which profoundly impacted the economics of the business. Now the business is crumbling. Everyone from Rupert Murdoch to the Associated Press is grousing about the business model which they helped to create. And publishers are trying to figure out how to charge for what they’ve given away for years.

The New York Observer has an interesting report on plans the New York Times is formulating to get online readers to pay in some fashion. One scenario involves Times Web content being free until a visitor’s reached a certain word count of number of page views; another would launch a membership system that sounds a lot like a public TV pledge drive. The first sounds unwieldy; the second might work for an august institution like the Times, but won’t save most of the industry.

I cheerfully admit that I’d like to see media companies figure out a way to make consumers comfortable with the idea of forking over cash for digital content. As a reader, I want to see the publications I love prosper, or at least manage to stay in business. As a journalist, I’d like to work in an industry with a business model that ensures that sites like, oh, Technologizer can thrive.

(Note: I have no plans to demand money from folks who read this site. But I just set up a Kindle version of Technologizer using Amazon’s new self-serve blog publishing system–the listing is live, but you won’t be able to subscribe for a day or two. It’ll cost $1.99 a month and I kinda think that I’ll be lucky if I make enough from my cut to buy myself a burrito every now and then.)

I wish I had some profound insight into how the media biz might make readers willing to pay for content again. I don’t. But these points seem self-evident:

1) Once you’ve begun to give something away for free, it’s mighty hard to convince someone that he or she should pay for it;

2) It’s tough to charge when you have direct competitors that don’t;

3) It is possible to charge for usually-free content if it’s in a form that provides new benefits (which is why people will pay for CSI as a DVD box set or an iTunes download even though it’s free on CBS);

4) It is possible to charge for high-quality stuff you can’t otherwise get (which is how HBO became a big business in the 1970s, even though TV had been free for decades);

5) Charging for something new that was never free isn’t inherently implausible (which is why the notion of paying two bucks a month to read blogs on the Kindle makes more sense than blogs announcing that they’re instituting a $2 subscription fee on the Web).

Add up all of the above, and I still don’t see a scenario developing in the immediate future in which millions of people pay meaningful amounts of money for the digital equivalents of newspapers and magazines. Then again, much of the Web’s history to date wasn’t predicted by anyone, so I’m not siding with the folks who say that it’s inevitable that the Web will be (mostly) free forever either.

Let’s end this with a T-Poll:

Sony Hints of PS3 Price Cuts

The last time everyone got excited for a Playstation 3 price cut, only to be disappointed, I swore off reporting on the matter, but only on the word of analysts, retailers, game publishers or other blogs. Here’s my loophole:

The whispers are now coming directly from Sony. In a conference call with overseas investors, the company said it plans to sell 30 percent more consoles this year than in 2008, CNBC reports. Asked specifically by an analyst about price cuts, corporate executive officer Nobuyuki Oneda said Sony had nothing to announce at the moment, indicating that he couldn’t discuss pricing strategies because it would affect inventory.

But then, another analyst asked how, exactly, Sony planned to reach 13 million PS3 sales this year. “Well, I think you have to guess what will be our pricing strategy,” Oneda said.

I would have liked to hear the tone of Oneda’s voice. It was probably straightforward, but I’m imagining a “that’s for me to know and you to find out” kind of coyness. Anyhow, there’s more reason than ever to speculate when, rather than if, the PS3′s price will come down.

E3 would be the obvious time to make grand announcement, but there’s also a feeling Sony will wait until August to squeeze out some more higher-priced sales before entering the holiday season. As CNBC points out, though, even a little sign like this is a warning to consumers. That’s why Sony has been so adamant in denying every previous rumor. Now it’s creating one, so why wait to seal the deal?

It’s worth mentioning that Nintendo projects flat sales figures for the current fiscal year, meaning it’ll sell roughly the same 26 million Wiis and 30 million Nintendo DSs this year as it did last year. Granted, Sony and Nintendo are in different boats, but we’ve had two months in a row of US sales declines for the PS3 compared to 2008, and two months of overall losses for the industry. The recession may finally be taking its toll.

For Sony to battle declining sales, it’ll have to do something drastic. I think we’ll have to guess what that will be.

Technologizer’s Tweetup: The Photos

This is the first time I’m linking to party snapshots here at Technologizer, but I have a good excuse: On Tuesday night, we held our Technologizer’s Tweetup party at Nectar Wine Lounge and Restaurant in Burlingame, California. 120+ FoTs (Friends of Technologizer) showed up and seemed to have a very good time, as you can see in these photos. (Here are additional shots from partygoers Andrew Mager and Terry Chay.)

Many thanks to everyone who stopped by, to my co-conspirators Marie Domingo and Elizabeth Olson, to the great staff at Nectar, and to our Tweetup sponsors: eHow, Speck Products, and TWTRCON. In answer to the night’s most frequently asked question: Yes, we plan to do this again.

What Happens On The Internet Stays On The Internet (Duh)

To preface, on a whim I searched the above phrase in Google and was surprised by how many results came up, verbatim (minus the “duh”). There’s even a T-shirt. I guess it can never be said enough.

In an article that hits close to home, the Chronicle of Higher Education notes how former writers for their college newspapers are shocked and chagrined to see their past words coming back to haunt them. The most telling anecdotes come from an education reporter whose old essay on college hookup culture was used against her by white supremacists and a Marine who feared his comrades would discover his essays on war, politics and economic policy.

In both cases, the editors refused to take down the old articles. They also would not “hide” the essays from search engines.

Coincidentally, The Business Insider’s Dan Frommer writes that a fellow Medill alumnus is circulating a petition to “darken” offending stories.

This is not the same situation as, say, when someone posts pictures of you without your knowledge or when you get arrested and turn up in the police blotter for all to see. These people wrote for an outlet which they knew appeared online, but failed to realize that their writing would stick around forever.

I’m not totally unsympathetic. Elementary school parents reading an education reporter probably don’t want to hear her opinions on sex. Having never served in the military, I can’t comment on the culture there, but I take the Marine’s word that he potentially faces some awkward situations.

In the end, though, the Internet is far too vast for people to demand retractions for everything that doesn’t sit well in retrospect. If someone really wants to dig up dirt on you, they’ll find it anyway.

Bottom line? Whether you’re a professional writer, commenter or occasional forum poster who doesn’t use an alias, be willing to stand by your writing for as long as the Internet exists, or be ready to explain why those words are no longer relevant. Otherwise, don’t write.

Rumor: Microsoft Can Kill Xbox 360s Remotely

Imagine if Microsoft could order a Red Ring of Death on an Xbox 360 if the company didn’t approve of the user’s actions, such as piracy or cheating.

One former software and hardware tester said this is possible. Speaking to 8BitJoystick, this recently laid off employee said Microsoft can activate a trigger that tells the Xbox 360 to fry itself, though it likely hasn’t done so out of lab testing. Upon receiving a broken console for repair, Microsoft could reportedly recognize the problem and decline to honor the warranty.

The source revealed several other tidbits, such as the possible release of Metal Gear Solid 4 for the Xbox 360 and the opinion that testers are overworked and underpaid, but neither of those are as shocking as the story’s other major revelation.

A bit of qualification: I follow 8BitJoystick’s Jake Metcalf on Twitter and he seems like a responsible writer. More importantly, he has a track record of digging up credible inside sources. He famously broke the news that Halo developer Bungie was leaving Microsoft (it was actually amusing to see bigger outlets laugh at him, then eat their words), and has posted a couple other juicy reports as well.

So when Metcalf says the source was “well vetted,” I believe him, even if the source’s information leaves me skeptical simply because it’s so unbelievable.

If the report is accurate, the obvious question remains: Does Microsoft have the legal right to do this? Yes, Metcalf argues, because hacking an Xbox 360 is a violation of the console’s terms of service, as well as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I was hesitant to agree at first, because Microsoft would then have to reserve the right, in its agreement with the user, to disable the console. However, the proof’s in the pudding. The pertinent section of Xbox Live’s terms says Microsoft may, among other things (emphasis mine ahead):

“(c) upgrade, modify, withdraw, suspend, or discontinue any functionality or feature of the Service, any game or other content available or accessible through the Service, or any hardware or software associated with the Service or with an original Xbox or Xbox 360 console, or personal computer, from time to time without notice, which may involve the automatic download of related software directly to your original Xbox, Xbox 360 console, or personal computer, including software that prevents you from accessing the Service, playing pirated games, or using unauthorized hardware peripheral devices.”

Presumably, such a software update could brick the console, and Microsoft could argue that doing so was necessary to prevent piracy. It boils down to the idea that when you’re playing on Microsoft’s console, you’re playing by Microsoft’s rules, and they reserve the right to handle the console any way they choose. Break the rules, and you’re on your own. That’s no rumor.

Gizapage: One Place for All Your Social Networks

How many social networks do you belong to? I’ve signed up for so many that I’ve forgotten about some of them, and I don’t even try to alert my pals to all the places they can find me. So I’m intrigued by GizaPage, a “social network organizer” (based in Israel) that launched this week.

It’s one of the simpler startup ideas I’ve run across lately: Basically, all it does is let you aggregate all your social network memberships on a page that puts each network in its own tab. (It supports more than forty networks and other services with social network-like features, from Amazon to Zoomr, and you can also plug in any URL you want.) Result: You can tell people your GizaPage’s address (mine is at harrymccracken.gizapage.com) rather than about each network individually.

And here’s my FriendFeed page as it shows up within Gizapage:

GizaPage has some social-networking features of its own, but they’re intentionally rudimentary. You can suck in contacts from sources like your Gmail account and friend other GizaPage users, but that’s mostly because the service has a privacy feature that lets you hide some of your social network tabs from everyone except your GizaPage friends, or hide them from everyone except yourself. The first option is useful if you’ve got some accounts you’re happy to let the world see, and others that are more intensely personal; the second one might be handy if you use Gizapage to put all your networks in one place so you can check them all without traveling all over the Web.

GizaPpage isn’t a social-network aggregator like FriendFeed–all the networks stay on their own tabs. There are places where it’s too spartan: The profile page that lives on the first tab people see when they visit your GizaPage is pretty drab, and I don’t see any way to shuffle around tabs once you’ve created them. The company says it plans to beef up customization options, as well as let uses create custom domain names rather than making them adopt one at GizaPage.com.

Even with its current limitations, it’s worth a look. If you check it out, let us know what you think.

Apple Only Making $20-45m from App Store

Lightspeed Venture Partners‘ managing director Jeremy Liew threw some cold water on Apple Thursday, saying that while the company has indeed sold some one billion apps, it likely has made no more than $45 million in revenue overall from the App Store.

Liew did some research to find that only one paid app is sold for every 15 to 40 free apps. This would infer that between 25 and 60 million of those one billion apps were paid for.

Going forward, he used the mean price for sold iPhone apps of $2.65, as released by O’Reilly. Together that would add up to revenues of $70-160 million, of which Apple only sees 30 percent of. Thus, $20-45 million in profits.

The kneejerk reaction here is to gasp and say, “wow, Apple’s App Store has been a failure from a revenue standpoint.” Not so fast, though. The company has repeatedly said it did not expect much revenue from its service, so this should come as no big surprise.

Add to this the fact that the App Store has a bigger purpose for the company over and above making money. It’s meant to draw people to the platform. While there’s no “killer app” for the iPhone just yet, the broad-based support it gets from services across the industry is a definite draw.

Notice how Microsoft and RIM have been scrambling to develop App Stores of their own? There’s a reason for that.

Google Falls Down, Gets Back Up

Last year, I wrote a post called A World Without Google. This morning, people have been living it: As you can tell from the chatter on Twitter, Google suffered some sort of major outage this morning. Google.com was unavailable, and as Cnet reporteed, folks also had trouble getting into everything from Gmail to Google News to YouTube to Blogger.

As of right now, Google is back–at least for me. There’s no mention of the troubles on the Google Blog, but I hope that the company acknowledges them and explains what happened. Like last January’s bizarre glitch that left Google identifying the entire Web as dangerous, this morning’s outage is a sobering reminder of just how dependent we are on the world’s most popular search engine. (Betcha Yahoo, Live Search, and Ask.com saw massive spikes in usage this morning.)

How instinctively do I use Google? When I was trying to find info on why Google wasn’t working, I…Googled for it. Or tried to, at least. Betcha I wasn’t the only person who did that…

Gmail Making it Simple to Switch

Google rolled out new functionality within Gmail Wednesday that would help ease the pain of switching e-mail providers. The backend of the service is provided by TrueSwitch, and works with a host of providers including AOL, Comcast, Hotmail, Verizon, and Yahoo (a full list is provided here).

The service will automatically import your mail from your previous account along with your contacts. In addition, it will allow you to import mail from your old account for a period of 30 days, and would add a label to these messages if the user so desires.

All newly-created Gmail accounts now have the functionality. Google said it is also busy rolling it out to existing accountholders, who might also be interested in using the import service.

While I’ve been using Gmail for quite awhile and have no need for functionality like this, I can see how this would be helpful to those wanting to take the plunge. The first few days with a new email account can be painful as one switches everything over.

This makes that process a whole lot simpler. Can’t argue with that, or the fact that its free.

5Words for May 14th, 2009

Wow, two USB drive items:

Ars Technica reviews USB drives.

A USB drive for backups.

Switching to Gmail made easy.

512GB SSD notebook from Toshiba.

Vodafone banishes international roaming charges.

Destroying Microsoft Office: surprisingly difficult.

AT&T bans (and emulates) SlingPlayer.

More e-readers to choose from.

Is Gmail having spam problems?

Sony loses a billion bucks.

Twitter Mythconception #11: You’re Required to Like It

I had a good time writing Ten Twitter Misconceptions, and I’m having an equally good time reading the comments on it–both the ones from Twitter enthusiasts and from those who remain skeptics. Some of the doubters, however, seem to be taking the story as me arguing that they should like Twitter. Other naysayers seem offended by the fact that some people like Twitter at all.

So maybe I should have added an eleventh mythconception to my list: The notion that there’s something wrong with disliking Twitter, or simply not being interested in it. I do think that some criticism of Twitter comes from people who just haven’t figured out how to make sense of it, With technology, as with everything else in life, it’s a good idea not to assume that something’s bad just because you don’t like and/or understand it.

But I’m proudly agnostic when it comes to technology, and don’t do missionary work on behalf of any product or service. (I’m always a bit befuddled when stuff I write about PCs and Macs inspires seething partisanship on either side–as far as I’m concerned, both Windows and Macs have their place…which, come to think of it, is probably why I use both.) If you don’t wanna use Twitter, that’s just fine with me. In fact, there’s no reason to bother with it unless it speaks to you.

(Okay, there is one reason to give Twitter a chance: Like a lot of worthwhile things, it’s an acquired taste. If you’d asked me about it during the first week I tried it, I would have mostly talked about how I didn’t understand its appeal. In fact, I stopped using it. But I’m glad I revisited it a few months later.)

Some of the tech thinkers I admire most are passionate advocates, such as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber (the smartest and most entertaining Mac fan you’ll ever encounter) and Robert Scoble (who won’t be happy until everyone on planet Earth likes FriendFeed as much as he does). Me, I’m happiest when the people I write for find technology that works for them, whatever it may be. And I’m tickled by the fact that the Technologizer community includes plenty of folks who cogently disagree with just about every word I write.

SlingPlayer for iPhone–Cool. And Crippled!

Back before I had an iPhone, I owned an AT&T Tilt phone. I ran the Windows Mobile version of SlingPlayer on it to watch my TiVo back home from my phone, courtesy of the Slingbox in my entertainment center. It worked wonderfully well over the AT&T network, and when I bought an iPhone 3G and put the Tilt into retirement, losing SlingPlayer was one of the few ways in which becoming an iPhone user wasn’t a major upgrade to my mobile life.

Today, eleven months after Sling announced it was working on SlingPlayer for iPhone, the app showed up in the iPhone App Store. In many ways, the iPhone was born to run SlingPlayer–video looks great on its sizable screen, and the software makes excellent use of a touch-driven user interface that pops up only when you need it.

Except…

Apple only accepted the application after Sling removed the ability to watch video over the iPhone’s cell connection. Unlike other incarnations of SlingPlayer Mobile, it’s Wi-Fi only.  Still a neat application, but one that won’t work in many of the places where I used to enjoy the Windows Mobile version, such as airport gates and my car.

(Clarification: It would work at airports, but I’d have to pay for the Wi-Fi in most places. And no, I don’t watch TV while driving…but I did used to call on SlingPlayer Mobile’s audio-only option, which both the Windows Mobile and iPhone versions offer.)

Apple isn’t saying why it forced SlingPlayer to go Wi-Fi only. But even if it had 3G access, using it would violate AT&T’s terms of service, which were recently rewritten to prohibit rerouting of a TV signal to a mobile computer. AT&T says that apps like SlingPlayer would simply hog too much precious bandwidth if it permitted them; the rule seems kinda arbitrary, considering that there are multiple iPhone apps that stream full-length video programming, such as CBS’s TV.com. And is AT&T busting folks who use SlingPlayer Mobile versions for other platforms?

On one level, I get AT&T’s concern–hey, its 3G network seems to clog up easily even without people streaming TV from their Slingboxes. But the release of a fundamentally crippled version of SlingPlayer for the iPhone is a sobering reminder that today’s wireless networks aren’t capable of supporting everything that we’d like to do with them, and the problem will only get worse as millions of people buy smartphones such as the iPhone. And it leaves me wondering whether any upcoming iPhone version of Hulu–which is, in many ways, a SlingPlayer-like service that doesn’t require a Slingbox–is going to be similarly dumbed down.

SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone and iPod Touch is $29.99–the same price as other versions, but the most I’ve paid for an iPhone app by a factor of about 3X, and pricey given that it doesn’t do the one thing that many Slingbox owners would like it to. Maybe I’m a wild-eyed optimist, but I’m hoping that Sling will eventually be permitted to add 3G support, and that those of us who have paid thirty bucks for this first version will get free upgrades.

After the jump, some screenshots of iPhone SlingPlayer in action (and I repeat–except for the network restriction, this is a nicely-done application).

Continue reading this story…