My friend (and blogging hero) Dan Gillmor doesn’t like last week’s changes at Facebook to privacy settings and the default state thereof. So he took a drastic, fascinating step: He decided to delete his account and start over.
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When Bad Things Happen to Good Products
Technology companies are awfully fond of comparing their work to poetry and art. Unlike most poets and artists, though, techies seem incapable of leaving well enough alone.
In fact, the industry’s whole business model depends on rendering last year’s model obsolete and convincing customers to fork over money for something visibly different. True, that strategy often yields worthy products–but it has also been known to prompt “upgrades” that were new but hardly improved.
Herewith, a look at ten disappointing (and sometimes disastrous) updates to formerly winning hardware, software, and services. No, this list doesn’t include the most legendary cruddy upgrades of them all, Windows Me andWindows Vista. (Covering them would have been like shooting operating systems in a barrel.)
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Technologizer Around the Web
When I started Technologizer, I thought it would be a place…and it is, of course. But it turns out to be a place that has outposts all over the Internet, often at sites that are a lot bigger than this one. Here are two current examples.
First, I’m going to be watching another Webcast and guest-tweeting as I do so. This one’s a conversation with Richard Florida, the author of The Rise of the Creative Class. It’s at 2pm ET this Monday, December 14th. Here’s where you get more information or just show up at that time to participate. (All visitors can tweet the interview directly from the site, if they’re so inclined, and some tweets will be picked to show up right alongside the talk while it’s in progress.)
Second, I’ve written another guest post for BingTweets. As usual, the general theme is the future of search, and this time I wrote about how much I’d like to see search impact TV just as much as it has the Web. The post’s called “The Search for Something to Watch.”
If you like Technologizer, I hope you’ll check out these extracurricular activities.
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Notable Mobile Apps of the Week
Google Goggles (Android)
Earlier this week Google Goggles launched to great fanfare. Yet I’m not so sure it’s currently “a huge leap forward in the field of visual search.” Basically, you snap a pic with your Android (1.6 or greater) device and Google does it’s best to identify it. Whatever it may be. However, in testing yesterday, Goggles kind of sucks. Evernote clearly beats it in OCR. ShopSavvy and RedLaser clearly beat it in product identification and research. But this is Google. And they’ve got more brain power and computing power than most. So it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on. In the meantime, Goggles supposedly does a good job with artwork and landmarks… if you happen to be lost in or near a notable museum.
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TomTom Puts the U.S. on Sale
GPS kingpin TomTom, which released its much-awaited iPhone version back in August for $99.99, has a new version out today for $49.99. The difference? The original edition (which remains available) covered the U.S. and Canada, and the new one is U.S.-only. It may not technically qualify as a price cut, since you get less for your money. But it does feel like a telling reaction to the extreme price sensitivity in iPhone appland, as well as the arrival of cheap GPS apps such as MotionX ($3.99 to buy, then $3.99 for any month when you use it).
Next question: What happens to TomTom and Navigon and AT&T and Networks and Motion and even MotionX if Google brings its free version of Google Maps with turn-by-turn directions from Android to the iPhone?
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Office 2003 Rights Management Bug Locks up Files
UPDATED: It’s a nightmare scenario: Imagine coming into the office and not being able to access any of your organization’s vital documents. That scenario became reality today for an untold number of Microsoft Office 2003 customers who use Microsoft’s Rights Management Service (RMS), a technology for controlling access to documents.
Office 2003 users receive the error, “Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator,” when they attempt to open or save protected documents. The bug affects Office 2003 products including Excel 2003, Outlook 2003, PowerPoint 2003, and Word 2003. It does not affect Office 2007 or Office 2010 Beta, according to Microsoft.
A spokesperson said that the bug was caused by a Information Rights Management (IRM) certificate expiring.
Microsoft has posted a bulletin to TechNet alerting customers to the problem, and says that it is working “as quickly as possible” to provide its customers with a solution. Further announcements will be posted to the blog.
Microsoft released a hotfix on Saturday. The Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 update is required for hotfixes to be installed.
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Two Google Search Enhancements
It’s been an uncommonly busy week for Google search. On Monday, the company unveiled its new real-time search feature and Google Goggles visual search. Now it’s ending the week with two additional meaningful new features. (And hey, it celebrated Popeye on its home page in between.)
New feature #1: Google Suggest, the feature that starts providing possible queries as you type, now provides possible answers in some cases.
The feature in its current form is fairly limited: It includes ten types of information (weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency, and unit conversions) and is only smart enough to figure out what you’re typing with certain phrasings of questions. (It seems to work best if you use as few words as possible rather than typing in wordy questions.) But at its best, it’s kind of eerie–Google gives you answers while you’re still typing.
New feature #2 is only for folks running the beta of Chrome 4 for Windows, but it’s also neat: It’s Quick Scroll, which auto-scrolls to sections of Web pages relevant to queries you’ve searched for–once you’ve clicked off Google onto a site in the results.
Quick Scroll is clever and useful. It’s interesting, though, to see it debuting as a Chrome extension–even though vastly more folks could take advantage of its goodness if it was a Firefox one. Google’s blog post on the new features doesn’t mention if the company plans to make it more widely available, but this is the most recent evidence that Google is starting to favor its own products in a way it hadn’t in the past.
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Apple Sues Nokia. Who’s Next?
““We’re very, very comfortable with where we are competitively…we like competition, as long as they don’t rip off our [intellectual property]…and if they do, we’ll go after them.”
–Apple COO Tim Cook, January
Early this year, there was much speculation on the Web about the possibility of Apple suing Palm over the Pre’s use of an iPhone-like multi-touch interface. So far, the two companies have stayed out of court. But Apple has now responded to last month’s Nokia lawsuit over networking patents by countersuing the Finnish giant. It denies that it’s infringed Nokia’s patents–but says that Nokia has violated a passel of Apple user-interface patents. Intentionally. And unashamedly.
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Should Microsoft Abandon Phones?
Over at the New York Times’ Bits blog, Steve Lohr is reporting on a shocking recommendation from tech analyst/writer Mark Anderson: Microsoft should abandon the phone business. Anderson says that Microsoft doesn’t get consumers–with the exception of game-playing consumers–and it’s time for the company to focus on business customers.
As Lohr says, the chances that Microsoft will give Windows Mobile a respectful burial and move on are slim. Very, very slim. If I were Steve Ballmer, I sure wouldn’t: Even if the company’s phone strategy is in crummy shape, some chance of getting back on track is better than no chance. Phones are the future of personal computing: To exit the business would be the equivalent of Warner Bros. giving up on TV in 1950, or the New York Times shuttering its Web site in 1998 or so.
So I’m not advocating for Microsoft to give up–and in fact would be happy to see Windows Mobile 7 turn out to be something worth getting excited over.
What say you?
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Gaming’s Flop of the Year is Tony Hawk: Ride
Even as skateboarding legend Tony Hawk mechanically read from the teleprompter during Microsoft’s E3 press conference in June, I got the sense that he was genuinely excited for Tony Hawk: Ride, which uses a motion-sensing, skateboard-shaped peripheral instead of a traditional controller.
Turns out, gamers didn’t share his enthusiasm, as Tony Hawk: Ride sold only 114,000 units across all three current-generation consoles in its November debut, according to IndustryGamers.
It’s actually surprising that the game performed so well. On the review aggregation site Metacritic, the game has an average score of 48, and aside from a few glowing reviews, the general opinion is below average or downright negative. The controls didn’t work, critics said, and the game itself felt sloppy and rehashed from a dozen other Tony Hawk skating games.
But I like Patrick Klepek’s theory over at G4: Ride was doomed from the start, he argues, because it doesn’t offer the easy fantasy that makes games like Guitar Hero or Wii Sports so compelling. At worst, it only frustrates the player into understanding the difficulty of real skating, but you get none of the thrill in the process.
This reminds me of what I’ve previously written about music games: Even to musicians, they’re fun because they encourage a shared obsession over the nuances of music, even among people who aren’t aficionados or fellow musicians. In other words, Guitar Hero and Rock Band offer an experience that even real instruments can’t duplicate. The same can’t be said for Tony Hawk: Ride. If you can ride a skateboard, you’ll get very little out of the game, and if you can’t, you’ll get even less.
I should’ve known Tony Hawk: Ride would flop when I saw the game’s E3 Trailer. “If you’ve had an interest in skating, but maybe didn’t want to put yourself in a position of getting injured, here’s your chance,” said pro skater Paul Rodriguez. When a game’s primary reason for existence is avoiding injury, that’s a bad sign.