Alexis Madrigal makes the case that Google+ and Facebook are asking us, as members of society, to do something we’ve never done before:
Every statement you make on Google Plus or Facebook is persistent and strongly attached to your real identity through your name. Both services allow you to change settings to make your statements more or less public, which solves some problems. However, participating in public life on the services requires attaching your name to your statements. On the boulevards and town squares of Facebook, you can’t just say, “Down with the government,” with the knowledge that only a small percentage of the people who hear you could connect your statement to you. But the information is still being recorded, presumably in perpetuity. That means that if a government or human resources researcher or plain old enemy wants to get a hold of it, it is possible.
The pseudonym advocates note that being allowed to pick and choose a different name solves some of these problems. One can choose to tightly couple one’s real-world identity and online identity… or not. One can choose to have multiple identities for separate networks. In the language we were using earlier, pseudonyms allow statements to be public and persistent, but not attached to one’s real identity.
David Plotz gave himself multiple birthdays on Facebook to see if people would mindlessly send him great birthday wishes each time. The results are depressingly unsurprising:
[T]he Facebook fake birthday experiment did end up confirming my worst fears about the network. All too many birthday wishes are autonomic, sent without thought or personal feeling. It’s one thing to remember your friend’s birthday because you took him out a decade ago for his drunken 21st birthday debauch. It’s much lamer to “remember” your friend’s birthday because Facebook told you to.
[H]ow can anyone repeat this luddite drivel with a straight face? It’s not just that much of what is printed in this article is untrue — a lot of it comes off as downright silly, and the author doesn’t seem to take a moment to ask any of these people to qualify their statements. It’s like she wrote the piece to back up arguments made by those profiled. The result is a piece that seems more intent on propagating one skewed view than it does with telling a story that has legitimate meaning.
Paul Ford has a nice meditation on the power of social networks to convey narrative, and why we still need curators (and journalists) to organize all the information out there for us, rather than computer algorithms:
I keep sensing some serious hurt feelings from the older-media side — “Why would you love that thing instead of me?” They act like my wife would if I brought home a RealDoll. But it’s not like that. I don’t think people love Twitter or Facebook in the same way they might love Parks and Recreation or Twilight. Rather, we like the beer and tolerate the bottle. And even if we have those other browser tabs open, we’re still hungry for endings.
Fascinating analysis of the necessity of putting friends into groups, and in particular, Google+’s cool Circles feature:
When I first started using Google+, I had a sense of déjà vu as I categorized my friends. I’d done this before… on Flickr, on Facebook, on Twitter, on my instant messenger contact list, and in my address book. Shortly thereafter, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth the effort to rigorously group everyone. Then I started thinking about whether it was ever worth the effort to do so…[T]here are some human subtleties we’re missing in the digital world.
Laura Keeley, on how Facebook got turned down by Boston venture capitalists:
Boston area firms missed out on the social networking boom in part because many didn’t grasp its significance, said Howard Anderson, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-founder of Battery Ventures. He said the average angel investor in Boston is about 55 years old. In California, the average is 32, he said. “It became a generational issue,” he said. “To understand things like Facebook, you have to be 19 to 24 years old. If you’re 56, you don’t quite get it.”
The Fuji Finepix X100 camera is one of the hottest cameras on the market today. It is completely unavailable at any online camera store and there’s are good reasons why: not only does it sport an incredibly attractive retro look and feel, it takes spectacular images with its fixed-focal length lens (23mm). Recent events in Japan have also significantly affected Fuji’s production rate, making this camera extremely difficult to come by.
After repeated and failed attempts to purchase this camera at places like Amazon, Adorama, and B&H, I decided to try calling some local places. I was extremely fortunate to find a unit at the Hunt’s Photo down in Kenmore Square. It was the last one they had, and they had gotten it into the store only a couple of days before. In its entire lifetime, this Hunt’s Photo shop had only sold six Fuji X100s. I was number seven.
Here’s a video of me unboxing the camera:
You can’t tell from this crappy iPhone video, but the box and packaging is super sleek and classy.
Once you try to get your hands on the controls, it is immediately clear that this is not a camera for beginners. There are no “automatic” modes such as “landscape” or “portrait.” Instead, you’re greeted with these dials:
The X100 is strictly for intermediate or advanced users and even professional photographers have had problems getting a handle on how to use it. This thing is very quirky and there are a couple of nearly deal-breaking annoyances that I’ve had to contend with. First of all, the Fuji X100 takes amazing portraits, but due to the wide angle lens, you need to get really close to your subject. This necessitates switching into macro focusing mode on the camera to get the subject in focus, which involves going into the menu and making a specific selection. This is extremely cumbersome and I missed a lot of great portraits this way (the focusing also performs quite poorly in low light).
There’s also the annoying fact that I can’t replicate my normal DSLR shooting workflow while on this camera. When I’m shooting with, say, a Canon 50D, I’ll look through the viewfinder, take a photo, then hold the camera away from my face so I can look at the photo on the display. For some reason, the X100 doesn’t allow a similar workflow, as it has very limited “View Modes.”
There are a bunch of other things here and there that are annoying and just plain weird (example: the ridiculously overpriced lens adapter/filter/hood isn’t even available for purchase, due to constrained supply), but once you can overcome those, the images you can get are pretty incredible. Moreover, the hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen and looks like it came straight out of a Mission: Impossible film. It needs to be seen to be believed.
A few other things deserve mentioning. The low-light performance on this camera is simply phenomenal. This thing does better in dark situations than my much heavier, much more expensive Canon 7D. I can easily take images at up to ISO 3200 that are usable and that fact absolutely dumbfounding to me. Here’s an image I took at ISO 2000. In my opinion, the grain is barely noticeable!
For strobist purposes, the camera can also sync at much higher speeds than 1/250th of a second (the maximum sync speed on most DSLRs these days). This means I can experiment with flash using wider apertures in broad daylight, something I’ve always wanted to do but never had the chance to. I’m really looking forward to the images I’ll be able to create with off-camera flash.
Here is a photo set I took with the X100 at a farewell dinner last night. Judge for yourself whether the camera is worth the price and the quirks:
I have never edited any video professionally, but with the recent purchase of my Canon 7D, I was really excited that Apple would be releasing a new version of Final Cut Pro that not only simplified and expedited the video editing process, but also only cost $300 in the Mac App store. However, the recent firestorm surrounding the release of Final Cut Pro X has given even me pause about clicking that “Buy” button.
Professional video editors all over the web have been howling about how the new software resembles and functions more like “iMovie Pro” than “Final Cut Pro.” Many of the crucial features from Final Cut Pro 7 have been excised or hidden, and Final Cut Pro X appears to be extremely buggy to boot (based on reviews from the Mac App Store). More damningly, Apple is no longer selling Final Cut Pro 7 and is discontinuing support for it. This means that millions of people who have spent years building their livelihoods around learning and using Final Cut Pro can no longer have confidence that they will be able to depend on this software for the foreseeable future.
