Summit Push

My One Laptop Per Child XO has arrived

I was very excited today to finally receive my XO laptop which I ordered through the Give 1 Get 1 program by the One Laptop Per Child project.  For $400, not only did get a laptop, but I was able to donate one to a needy child somewhere.  And on top of that, I get a free year of T-mobile hotspot usage.  A killer deal.

But you probably know all of that already, what you want are the juicy details on what I actually found when I opened the box, so after the jump is my quick review of the XO. 

Is the Facebook Beacon Illegal?

Like just about everyone who has been hit by it, I'm not very happy about the Facebook Beacon.  It was bad enough Facebook felt that I wanted everyone to know whenever I was wasting time playing flash games on Kongregate.  That just irritated me.  Now Facebook is actually ruining Christmas for people by announcing to all their friends the Christmas presents they just purchased.  As the uproar unfolds, I kept thinking "is this legal?" 

I decided to hop on over to the Facebook Privacy Policy.  I must admit I could not decipher all the legalese at the bottom.  But Facebook has made it easy for us by lying to our faces right at the beginning.

Facebook follows two core principles:

1. You should have control over your personal information.
Facebook helps you share information with your friends and people around you. You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the My Privacy page.

2. You should have access to the information others want to share.

There is an increasing amount of information available out there, and you may want to know what relates to you, your friends, and people around you. We want to help you easily get that information.

Facebook has not followed these principles with the Facebook Beacon.  I have lost control of my personal information.  I have no idea if it would hold up in court, but I hope someone more savvy and with more free time sues them.  If you use Facebook, and they violate the principle of the Privacy agreement they provide, it seems like at least some grounds for a case to me.

Myself, I'm following these steps to block the Facebook Beacon, and aggressively deleting my Facebook cookies whenever I can.

Trouble with Grand Central

I've been using the GrandCentral service for about two months now.  I absolutely love the concept.  Being able to move my phone number around, and being able to access my voicemail via the web is truly great.  I would even pay for this service.  Unfortunately, my experiences of the past two days are getting close to the point where I don't know if I can use the service any more.

Since I started the service, there have been occasional dropped calls, annoying, but nothing too troublesome.  Then yesterday, for about an hour, my phone number stopped working (similar to if you called an out of service number).  It eventually cleared up, but it definitely was a big concern for me.  Today, the same thing happened.  This time, I went to their website, and it also was down.  A few minutes later, I got the image above that mentions "scheduled maintenance".  If this was scheduled maintenance, I certainly never got any notification.  The only thing that is accessible right now is the GrandCentral Blog, and it hasn't been updated since October 4th.  Taking the system down and not providing any notice is really unacceptable.

There are plenty of great web services that I use where I can deal with some flakiness.  My phone number is not something that can be flaky, though.  I would have thought that Google's purchase of GrandCentral would give them the resources to provide this reliability, but apparently all they inherited from Google was their "ignore the customer" support model. 

One Laptop Per Child (and one for me!)

The Give One Get One program is starting today.  I just ordered my XO, you should too!  For $400, you donate one laptop, and you get one for yourself.  I'm excited about this for two reasons.  First of all, it's a way to help get an exciting project off the ground.  And second, it looks like a really fun toy!  A $200 laptop that has wireless, and is designed to be rugged, there are a lot of uses for that.  I don't know how long it will take before it is delivered, but I promise I'll post a detailed update as soon as I get my hands on it.  Go donate!

Also, it turns out that T-mobile is offering a free 1-year subscription with your laptop.  That's a $350 value thrown in to this already awesome package.  Go donate!

How Open is OpenSocial?

Let me start this post with two disclaimers.  First of all, I think OpenSocial is a great idea, and I'm excited to start building applications for it.  Second, I Am Not A Lawyer.

So given the tremendous amount of hype yesterday around this OpenSocial announcement, which I will admit to being a part of, I decided to spend my morning digging into the details now that the API and docs are available.  The API itself is pretty vanilla.  It is very cool that it uses standard Javascript and not some special markup language like Facebook does, but other than that, there aren't many major differences.  So, from a developer perspective, you've got two APIs you need to learn, and the net of the big MySpace surprise is that you won't have to learn a third, which is nice.  The small edge that Facebook has, though, is that because their API is specific to Facebook, it is more detailed.  For instance, there are functions to access the marketplace, photo album, etc. 

I wasn't satisfied.  With a grandiose name like OpenSocial, I thought there has to be something inherently better in here.  So I started digging into the Terms of Service.  In a truly Open world, an application would be able to move a user's data seamlessly from one site to another (with their permission of course), making one big happy world.  Again, IANAL, but from what I can tell, that is not the case.  Here is the relevant section:

If your gadget enables you or any party to gain access to information about users of the gadget, including but not limited to personally identifying and non-personally identifying usage information, you or the party receiving the information must make publicly available, and abide by, a legally adequate privacy policy...  Google reserves the right to refuse or discontinue participation to anyone, and to disable users. access to any social application, at any time in its sole discretion with or without notice.

If your gadget enables you to gain access to photographs, images, videos, music, audio files or other sounds available on a Google website, you may use that content solely to display or provide it to the user from whom the content is obtained.  Other websites may have policies regarding your use of or access to content of various formats, and it is your responsibility to make yourself aware of and comply with those policies.

Contrast this with the Facebook TOS:

4) Except as provided in Section 2.A.6 below, you may not continue to use, and must immediately remove from any Facebook Platform Application and any Data Repository in your possession or under your control, any Facebook Properties not explicitly identified as being storable indefinitely in the Facebook Platform Documentation within 24 hours after the time at which you obtained the data, or such other time as Facebook may specify to you from time to time;

Both of these are pretty dense, but it sounds like the story is about the same.  You can store some basic information, but the various sites have control over what you can export.  My dreams of a unified photo album where you can add pictures from any site and view them from all, are pretty much flushed down the toilet.  At least Facebook is kind enough to define the data we can store, Google remains vague about it.

And lastly, Google retains the right to kick you out without notice.  This was one of the big fears in developing a Facebook application, and it looks like it won't go away.  In the end, these are all businesses, and while they like the PR that goes with "Open", they're not going to do anything that doesn't make business sense, or give away much of their power.  OpenSocial is a business decision, by pooling their sites, they all get more application development, and a side effect is that it makes a developer's life a little easier.

In summary, I don't see a very compelling case the OpenSocial is going to put the Facebook API out of business.  I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this, especially if my reading of the TOS is wrong, which it very well might be.

UPDATE 11/3:  Just read gwachob's post about OpenSocial, and I think his analysis is very similar to mine.  His writing is much better, though, so go read it :)

 

OpenSocial

I've been very excited by the news about Google's OpenSocial initiative.  It is very intriguing, and as competition generally tends to favor the user, it's great to see some competition to the Facebook platform.  Some valid points were made that the announced group of partners was much smaller put together than Facebook.  But things just kicked up a notch when I saw Scobleizer announcing on Twitter that MySpace execs were at the Google Press conference and HUGE things were happening.  Sure enough, a few minutes later, TechCrunch announced that MySpace, SixApart, and Bebo were joining OpenSocial.  This really changes the game.  Enough news stories, I want to get my hands on the API!

www.tripreportfinder.com

I won't lie, development is moving more slowly than it should.  There are plenty of excuses I could give, but that's not important.  What is important is that I felt the need to get *something* out the door, so I put together this idea I had been thinking about for a while, www.tripreportfinder.com.  It's basically a little front end work on top of a Google Custom Search Engine.  The goal is to index all variety of Trip Reports across the web, which is a great tool for learning about any climbing or hiking objective.  You can study all the facts you want, but reading about someone's experience really gives you a great perspective.  It's also a great way to find inspiration for new trips!

I put a pretty good pile of content into it, but the internets are huge, so please help me out!  If there are sites you read that aren't indexed, or even better if you have some trip reports of your own, send the link!