Jason's posterous

Why Google+ Might Succeed

Two good points about Google+, both from politcal bloggers oddly enough. First, Ezra Klein:

It’s not that any of its features are so revolutionary. It’s not that it’s better at doing social networking than Facebook. It’s that it’s an opportunity to start over, to build your social network with years of Facebook experience in mind, rather than having to face the accretion of mistakes and miscalculations you made over almost a decade of trial-and-error with a new technology. 

This is exactly right. We all learned the hard way that sharing via Facebook tended to expose things we didn't want to. Google+ gives us the opportunity to correct that. Plus (haha), it has better integrated privacy controls to keep things private.

Next up is  Matthew Yglesias:

I think the underlying issue here was actually laid out extremely well in The Social Network and then ignored in the ensuing discussion of the film. But the movie has Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly emphasize that what makes Facebook an appealing product is that it’s “cool” and “exclusive” and they shouldn’t ruin it by making it uncool.

He's right. We're destined to constantly move to new and different social networks. We'll do it for the same reason we move to new and different places in real life: the old ones are no longer cool.

 

Wonkbook: The disaster we refuse to see coming - Ezra Klein - The Washington Post

There are disasters we can’t see coming, and then there are disasters we refuse to see coming. That an earthquake (and tsunami) of biblical proportions would crack open nuclear power plants along the coast of Japan is the sort of catastrophe that’s very difficult to predict. On the other hand, the consequences of a large increase in the volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are not hard to predict.
via washingtonpost.com

Great writing from Ezra Klein. The refusal of our nation's political leaders to deal with climate change will become one of histories greatest mistakes.

Initial Impressions of the ChromeOS notebook

These are a few of my initial thoughts on using the CR-48, otherwise known as the ChromeOS notebook. I don't have anything earth shattering to say that hasn't been said before, just a few of my own unique impressions:
  • Initial sync worked like a charm, though my extensions didn't sync. There is a check box to sync them, but it didn't work for me.
  • The download pane is painfully basic. No file management at all.
  • The general browsing experience is just a little slower than I'd like. One thing I do a lot is load tabs in the background, and any time I do that the CR-48 slows to a crawl.
  • As others have stated, flash performance sucks. Youtube is passable, Hulu is unwatchable. FlashBlock is a must.
  • The notebook comes with a gchat application, which creates a series of persistent panes at the bottom of the screen (similar to the way gchat works in gmail.) However, the only notification of an incoming message is a quick tone. A quick check verified that HTML5 notifications work (and pop up in a similar pane to everything else.)
  • If you press CTRL-ALT-/ you get a keyboard overlay that shows you all the built in keyboard shortcuts. As you hold down modifier keys, the keyboard displays the shortcuts available. This is a nice touch.
  • As every other review has noted, the touchpad is bad. I've had similarly bad experiences with other laptops with no button touchpads (the one exception being the Macbook) and this one is no better. Two finger scrolling is oddly jumpy.
  • Another nice touch is the logout/power down animation. If you hold down the power button, the entire screen begins to shrink toward the center. Keep holding down, and you'll be logged out. Repeat the sequence and you'll power down.
  • Those application panes at the bottom of the screen don't persist across log in/out.
  • Strangely, most things don't update as changes happen. For example, the picture viewer has controls for moving between images (screenshots, for example.) But after opening the image viewer and then taking a few screenshots, I had to close it before the new ones would appear. Same for the downloads pane.
Overall, the most surprising thing to me has been how quickly I forgot that this is a ChromeOS device. Once I'd set up all my extensions, I basically just started surfing the net the way I usually do. It'll be interesting to see how I use it long term (and maybe try to develop some applications on it.)

(download)