But that thinking is a bit backwards. Facebook did not kill Myspace. Not directly anyway. Myspace more or less killed itself, by failing to innovate and keep pace with the changing market. While Facebook was offering it’s users new and interesting features, Myspace remained stagnant and unmoving. It’s no wonder that a lot of people simply jumped ship, and left their accounts lay fallow. By the time the migration became too apparent to ignore, it was already to late. The network effect kicked in and most people simply had no reason visit Myspace anymore seeing how all their friends have moved on.

Does this mean that this is how all social networks work? Not necessarily. Twitter has been going strong for many years now and I have been a member almost since the beginning. You could say it’s success is partly related to the fact that they don’t directly compete with facebook. Both are in the business of data mining social graphs, but they offer very different experience to their users. So both are able to co-exist peacefully.

Google Plus – the new contender seems to be more of a threat to Facebook, but so far it has been gaining momentum on its own merit. When it first launched everyone kept comparing the two, and there was a lot of talk about “switching”. Now that the hype died down, it seems that things have settled a bit and people are slowly realizing that you can use more than one network.

For example, I have been using all 3 for some time now, and I noticed that I tend to use them for very different things.

The network I’m spending most of my time at these days is Twitter. This is sort of my go-to place for posting funny one-liners, jokes and drop sudden profundity bombs whenever I manage to think them up. It is where I go to goof off. One thing I like about Twitter is how open it is. It has never been a walled garden – in fact it has been anything but. It is a platform for broadcasting your thoughts and ideas to wide audiences, and I love how my tweets sometimes reach people who don’t know or follow me via the magic of re-tweets or public timelines. More than once I have posted a question there, only to get a prompt answer from a complete stranger.

Facebook to me is a personal communication tool. I use it to share pictures, and messages with close friends and family. I also syndicate my Twitter output there, because most of my Facebook friends never actually venture on the World Wild Web unless you make them. Which is I guess the main way Facebook differs from Twitter – it’s users never seem to want to leave. It is a walled garden, and I tend to use it as such. My privacy on Facebook is cranked up to 11, and I usually tend not to friend people I don’t know, or have met IRL. I hardly ever post original stuff there, because I know that my audience is fairly limited. Or rather the only original posts there are things that would interest close friends and family (as in “check out these pictures I took on so-and-so’s wedding”).

I reviewed Google+ not so long ago, but at the time I had no clue how I was going to use it. Since the network is young, it still seems to have a somewhat geeky vibe to it (though perhaps its just my circles that are like that). When I scroll through my Twitter or G+ streams I see tech news, video game related stuff, RPG topics and etc. When I scroll through my Facebook wall a lot of that cool stuff gets drowned out by more mundane real life garbage. So to keep with the spirit of things, I decided to use my G+ for geeky posts.

That said, I didn’t really want to make it a duplicate of my Twitter stream. I already do that for Facebook (because of the walled garden issue) but G+ is more open than that. So while my Twitter persona has been evolving towards becoming a full time geek-joke producing machine, I figured my G+ profile could be for SRS BZNS type stuff – namely commenting on tech & science news. So that’s what I have been doing with it lately.

So to summarize: I use Facebook to interact with close friends and family, Twitter to goof off with everyone and G+ to post interesting tech & science articles I find on the web, and discuss them with my geek brethren. Each network has it’s own niche, and I find all of them useful. Each one lets me interact with a slightly different group of people, even though I do have a significant overlap of friends on all these networks.

Btw, feel free to follow me @LukeMaciak or circle me +LukeMaciak.

How do you use your social circles? Are you on Twitter/Google+? Do you have specific things you post on each network, or do you tend to replicate your output on all of them. Let me know in the comments.

• Reddit
• Digg
• Slashdot
• Boingboing

Do you visit any of them? Or all of them? Personally, I spend most of my time on Reddit because it tends to have the best signal to noise ratio without actually employing all powerful editors that hand pick best submissions. Of course there is a downside to this. On some days the front page of Reddit looks like this:

Yes, I posted a FUUUU joke. Se me

Then again sometimes Reddit is incredibly awesome. For example, some time ago I submitted a theoretical question involving special relativity and use of ansibles to the science subreddit and actually got some serious and thoughtful responses. The question received 17 upvotes and 6 downvotes but still generated a rather interesting theoretical discussion in the comments. The only other place on the interwebs where I could ask such a question and actually get replies is… Well, here. So that’s why I like Reddit. Like minded folks and good content.

I also visit Slashdot and Boingboing from time to time as well. Especially on the days when Reddit turns into 4chan meme recycling mill. I hardly ever go to Digg though… Which is probably a side effect of hinging out at Reddit so much. How about you guys? Where do you spend your time? Feel free to pimp out your favorite geek news and trivia sources in the comments.

Btw, as a rule I do not subscribe to RSS feed from any of these sites. I subscribe to blogs and online comic strips but not news aggregators. I access those the old fashioned way by going to the website and/or clicking refresh. Why? Because these sites have astonishing output rates. I tried subscribing to them once, and I could never keep up with their pace. After just a few days I would have 1000+ unread articles in each of the feeds (half of them probably dupes). Whenever I managed to clear one of these piles, new articles would start piling up within hours. It just doesn’t work.

Not only that, but we also have this thing called simultaneous invention. I wrote about this phenomenon before so you can check out that post if you missed it. TLDR version is that scientists and technologists who never met or even heard about each other can often come up with very similar ideas around the same time. For example there seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Yes, I’m not shitting you – go click on that link, and read Kevin Kelly’s post I’m referencing. This is just how science works. Or rather, this is how human mind works.

This idea of simultaneity applies to art, music and literature as well. Creative minds will often come up with similar stylistic approaches, styles and sensibilities independently.

So on one hand we can see that all artists are influenced by the things they have seen in the past, the works of their mentors and idols and the classical pieces they studied. Their minds are pre-loaded with existing templates upon which their draw. Every piece of creative work they produce somehow tainted by these experiences. On the other hand there is a tendency for independent artists to coverage onto similar ideas from different directions.

Everything we create as a species is by definition is redundant and derivative.

Creative process is less about originality, but about taking the existing building blocks and arranging them in interesting ways. Similarly, we judge art, music and literature not on how original it is but rather whether it conveys a poignant message, provokes a reaction or evokes an emotional response. No one really cares that the individual components are not original as long as the end product offers something more than merely the sum of it’s parts. Borrowing, referencing, adapting and outright emulation are all fair game. They have always been.

We currently live in a wonderful age of digital media where information can be copied, remixed and mashed up almost effortlessly by just about anyone. In the past, an artist who wanted to “borrow” from another work had to go through the process of re-creating that element. Today, he can simply copy and paste it. Now we have people who create original work that derivative – composed solely from bits and pieces “borrowed” elsewhere, edited and mashed up together. Let me show you an example – here is a video which was made by stitching together short clips from various movies and TV shows and arranging them to sync up with a background beat:

‘The Golden Age of Video’ by Ricardo Autobahn youtubed by spraynetdotcodotuk

You could argue whether or not something like this constitutes art. It is creative, entertaining and awesome though. I would also argue that it is good precisely because it steals and borrows content from elsewhere. It works, because each of the short clips used to create the video triggers a personal memory. It not only bombards us with nostalgia but also breathes a new life into these half forgotten, cherry picked moments of awesomeness. It is certainly more than merely the sum of it’s parts – and as such it is valuable, and worth seeing.

Sadly, under current copyright regime such remixes and mash-ups are un-poducts. Legally ambiguous at best, illegal at worst. It’s basically like this – these derivative works are relatively safe, because it would be too expensive for a copyright holder to sue it’s creator for using a 5 second clip somewhere in the video. Also, if they do sue they are not guaranteed to win. Depending on the context, the length of the clip used, and the intent the creator could sometimes successfully argue that his work is protected under the fair use clause. Maybe…

An obvious solution here would be to obtain the permission from the copyright holder. Have you ever tried to do it though? How do you get a permission to use a 5 second video or audio clip from a major motion picture or album? You don’t. You will be lucky if the copyright holders even acknowledge your existence by laughing in your face and showing you middle finger. They probably won’t even do that though – they will ignore you.

So while creating mashups is easy, legalizing them is not. What is worse, this type of creative expression is becoming more and more common as the music/video editing technology available to private consumers improves, and their internet bandwidth increases. On one hand we have masses who want to create and publish their own legally ambiguous mashups. On the other hand we have media industry lobbying the governments all over the world to tighten copyright law and crack down on the internet as a one big tool for piracy. These two movements are on a collision course and that worries me. How do we reconcile this?

I have said it before and I’ll say it again – our copyright law is obsolete and outdated. It is an archaic relic from an era that is long gone and will never return. It had an important role in the past, and parts of it still have use today. But right now it is more of a nuisance than anything else. Tomorrow it will become a hindrance instead – it will be our cultural ball and chain.

I tell you this – we are moving away from physical media. Our art, music, literature and cinema can now be accessed digitally. They are no longer tied to physical anchors that inhibit their distribution. Anything you digitize becomes a virtual commodity – an idea. It can be copied at the speed of thought. This will only become more ambiguous in the future when the line between man and the machine starts to fade, and when human consciousness will no longer become independent of the physical shell that contains it. Can virtual commodities consumed by virtual beings that exist in virtual worlds be controlled using laws that were written to control physical media? Can we police digital minds to make sure they are not using copyrighted thoughts?

Why? Because you are likely to be sending private data in plain text over that network. If you ever see me running an open wifi node you can safely assume I am probably sitting thee with a packet sniffer collecting people’s facebook passwords so that I can log in into their accounts and change their profile pictures to Goatse with a caption: “I AM A STEALER OF THE INTERNETS”.

Actually, scratch that – I wouldn’t do that because I’m a nice guy. It’s not in my nature to do things like that and – I can’t really hide it. You can tell whether or not someone is a good guy that by observing how many sexy ladies there are in his orbit at any given time. If you see a guy who has more orbiting bodies than Jupiter, you can tell the dude is an incredible duchebag and a horrible human being. So you should probably hang out with him in hopes of intercepting one of the outlying satellites.

Are these astronomical relationship jokes doing anything for you? No? Well screw you then. The point is that Facebook and similar websites can be prime target for packet sniffing. So are things like POP email, IM clients and etc. You shouldn’t trust any network, including yours but suspiciously open wifi networks are the worst. How do you know the owner of your internet gateway doesn’t have it set up to log all the crap that goes through it. You don’t. Even if you think your neighbor Joe wouldn’t do such a thing, you can’t be sure that his nephew Sid who set up his wifi is not a diabolical jerk who collects peoples passwords for fun and profit.

When you are on a strange network you should be at least using SSL to make sure that things like passwords are not being sent in plain text. Most of the sites are pretty good about it and do serve their content via SSL. Most do not default to it though – facebook is a prime example here. The default login page is not encrypted. Furthermore and because of how the Application API works even if you log in over SSL the content you get served is mixed – parts of it come in un-encrypted so you are still leaking data.

Or even worse – what if, for example you are running a self hosted blog like me. Do you use SSL to log in? You do? Holly fucking shit! I don’t! I never actually thought about it, until few days ago!

Granted I don’t steal internet (like some of you people, you know who you are) but I do sometimes log in from school, work, and etc. This is not acceptable. So as you can imagine, the first thing I did after realizing this was to go and set up an SSL certificate for the blog. The second thing I did was to add this line to my wp-confing.php:

  define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);

What does this do? It forces wordpress to use SSL for all administrative functions and redirects all links accordingly. So for example if I get an email notification about a post in moderation queue I can hit the “approve” link and have WordPress automatically serve me the SSL encrypted page instead of an un-encrypted one. This makes me feel a little better about logging into my own website from networks I don’t actually own.

I still wouldn’t use someones insecure wifi connection though. Unless for torrents of course. Which is why you should should use WPA/WPA2 or better kids. Otherwise some jerk will use all of your available bandwidth to download tons of movies and video games without ever worrying about being caught.

This just in, man walking is faster than FIOS! Earlier today a man walked across the street with a 1TB hard drive, at the same time he transferred the file using Verizon FIOS. The fios managed only 1% by the time the man had made it across the street.

I was one of those copy and paste forwards without source attribution, so I can’t really say if this was a real anecdote, a joke or a jab at Verizon for sucking at bandwidth. The message was sent with the subject “FiOS loses to a pedestrian” which I think was suppose to evoke shock, amusement and disbelief. Of course it only works that way if you are clueless.

I can clearly see how a regular person could read the headline and go “no way!” and be amused after reading the short text. On one hand, FiOS has reputation of being blindingly fast. On the other hand everyone had an experience with sending large files over the internet taking forever and a half. Juxtaposing the two forces the reader to hold these two contradictory notions in mind at the same time making ones original assumptions about FiOS speed seem exaggerated.

That’s if you are clueless though. If you do posses some clue, you will know that sneakernet has always been and still is the fastest way of transmuting data. Note that I said fastest – it’s definitely not the most convenient, cost efficient or practical one. But it is fastest.

I mean think about it. On FiOS you can theoretically upload data as fast as 20 MBps. But since FiOS is a best-effort type network you will likely be running much below that. You are also limited by the destination’s download speed. So even if you can send the data at full 20MBps the recipient may only have 6MBps download bandwidth to work with. Sending 1TB will take forever.

Using sneakernet however is different because the bandwidth is almost infinitely scalable. You are almost always sending all of the data in a single batch at rather modest speeds. These days you can carry 1TB in your pocket. If you have to transfer few hundred of terabytes you can take a wheel barrel or load the drives into your car. So our bandwidth is limited only by how fast we can move the data from one location to the other. If you keep the distance and velocity constant then the bandwidth will grow proportionally to the amount of data you are sending. That is a unique property of sneakernet and we can’t really hope to ever match it. Digital networks simply do not work that way.

In other words, there will always be some large quantity for which sneakernet will be faster than the best available high bandwidth network. So I 40 years I will be able to take that quote above, replace FiOS with the equivalent service, increase the 1TB value by two or three orders of magnitude and it will evoke the exact same response as it does today.

So keep that in mind next time you see something like this. You can’t really compare FiOS to sneakernet. The two are just too different. It’s like comparing sending your friend a postcard and delivering it to him in person. If you mail something you use an established network with it’s own built in overhead. The postcard has to be picked up, sorted, processed, routed to destination and then delivered. It takes time, but it’s convenient. In person delivery skips all that overhead at the cost of time and effort on your part. Each method has it’s benefits and trade offs.

If I had to transfer 1TB of data across the street, I would strongly consider just walking it over there in person. If I had to transfer that same TB to, say, China I would probably be more inclined toward electronic transfer. You pick the tool that fits the job.

You know, we didn’t even have the failwhale back then. We had fucking lolcats notifying us or error messages. If you don’t remember that fucking cat, you can consider yourself a newbie.

Over the years I watched the service grow, expand, become more stable and add new features. I wrote several twitter tools and clients, and tried just about every single third party client out there. In fact, Twitter even made my ISP suck less that one time. I love the service and I enjoy using it.

This is why I get annoyed when people who just heard about Twitter yesterday tell me that Twitter is the stupidest thing ever. I’m sorry, but you have no clue what you are talking about. I’ve been using it for years now, and I find it very useful and valuable. You just saw it on TV the other day and you are convinced it is useless. May I ask how did you decide this?

Usual answer I get is something among the lines of:

“Well, why would I care what someone ate for lunch or what TV show they are watching right now”

I don’t care abut that stuff either, but I use Twitter every day. I just don’t follow people who only tweet about their lunches or their TV shows.

“I also don’t care about what the celebrities are posting – it’s mostly stupid, useless crap anyway.”

I agree, but again, no one is forcing you to follow these people. I have no interest in the crap that Oprah, Shaq or one of the other countless mainstream celebs might be spewing out on the internet. I follow people I know IRL or from the interwebs, people who I find interesting (Jeff Attwood – creator of Coding Horror and Stack Overflow, like John Resig – the jQuery creator, Adam Savage – the Mythbuster, Chris Boys – the infamous Papeghost, the pwnr of script kiddies or Shamus Young known for DM of the Rings, Stolen Pixels his blog and bunch of other things) or genuinely funny (hotdogsladies, Matthew Baldwin, Adam Lisagdor, Scott Simpson, Tim Siedell, domnit). How’s that for a starter list? Feel free to add awesome follow-worthy names in the comments.

“Ok, ok. But I already have Facebook. Twitter is like Facebook status without my Facebook contacts, my applications, pictures, notes, feeds and all that good stuff. Why would I ever want to use that?”

Here you are just plain old wrong. Twitter is not a “Facebook status without Facebook”. It is a completely different animal. On twitter most people have public profiles which means anyone can follow them. So you can subscribe to the updates of interesting people without them having to approve you. Can you do that on Facebook? No, on Facebook most people have private profiles (which is actually a good thing, considering the amount of info you can find on a persons Facebook page). This means it is easier to meet people, and have conversations with folks you don’t know and don’t intend to follow.

Twitter also allows you to reach a wider audience. For example, who reads your status updates on Facebook? Friends, family, people you know from school, work and perhaps some internet buddies you trust. You could mess around with the privacy settings and allow more people, but still – your audience will be limited.

Let me give you a real life example. The following exchange could never happen on Facebook, but on Twitter this is normal:

Twitter Conversation (click to enlarge)

It is a different service used for different purpose. If you using it the way you use Facebook then you are probably doing it wrong.

Not only that, but Twitter is unique among social services in that it is not a walled garden. To access anything on Facebook, you need to create an account. Twitter only requires you to create account to post tweets. You can however follow someone without ever logging in using the public RSS feeds. You can also archive and back up your own tweets in the same way.

The public feeds and public API allows people to create interesting applications and mashups on top of Twitter. A good example could be Twistori or Favrd.

What bothers me the most, is the people who are throwing all this Twitter hate around are not old. Old ladies for example seem to be very interested in the service and often ask me how do you set it up, how it works and etc. The haters usually are young, often internet savvy people.

I guess this is a status thing. These people were too cool to use it back when it was geeky and virtually unknown. Now they are too cool to use it, because it is “oh, so mainstream”.

What is your take on Twitter? Have you encountered a lot of this type of Twitter hate lately? Let me know in the comments.

Blocking the right mouse click via Javascript is not a solution, because most people these days know how to get around that trick. And no, they don’t even have to know how to disable javascript.

You see, most of these scripts are found somewhere on the internet, and then copied and pasted to the offending websites. Unfortunately, roughly half of them are badly written and work only in IE6 and 7 but fail in modern browsers such as Firefox. A lot of times when I encounter these scripts I simply need to close the alert box that pops up, and once it is gone my context menu shows up anyway allowing me to save the image.

Oh, and a lot of people know that pressing Print Screen will take a screenshot that you can later crop to get a copy of the image. This doesn’t always work for high resolution stuff, but if you just want a small or medium sized pic, this is probably the easiest way to do it.

I understand that an artist who sells high rez copies of his/her work might want to protect their stuff. This is really not the way though. For example, look at all the major websites that sell stock images. They don’t even bother with the right-click blocking tactics – the know better than that. Instead, they put up low-rez, watermarked copies on their website, and hide the high rez stuff behind, requiring a credit card payment before they give it up. Most of the time they don’t care if people steal the samples – they are watermarked and therefore mostly unusable anyway.

What kills me is the websites that try to protect their stuff even when it doesn’t make sense. Let me give you an example – I recently found this funny shirt at the Zazzle.com online store.

I was like, let me tumbleblog it and link back to them. Sadly, when I tried to grab the image I saw this:

Protection Fail

Not only is this ineffective, but also a bit silly. Here I am, trying to send some traffic their way and they throw obstacles in my way. I mean, what is the purpose of “appearing to protect” the images of the products you sell? I mean, the image itself has no value. They make money on selling the actual physical product it represents. So you would think that having the image shared on the internet would only improve their business. People would see it, an be like “dude, where do I buy that” – and someone would google it and then comment back with the link to Zazzle.com. How is that bad for them?

I mean, what is the worst that could happen if their image was “stolen”. Someone puts it on the internet and doesn’t link back to them? Someone makes an identical t-shirt on Caffepress? Well, that’s when you send a lawyergram to the company that put up the store and get it booted off the internet. Sadly, they can make an identical tshirt design whether or they copy that low resolution image from your website.

So, Zazzle.com fails at internet. If you want to be an online pusher of silly tshirt designs you have to know how to internet the right way. If you don’t know how to internet, then you shouldn’t even be on it. That’s my oppinion at least.

Then we got the internet – a wonderful medium that is not as passive as TV. It allows you to actively seek out information, learn play and communicate with others faster and more efficiently than ever before. What do smart researches say now? The internet is making us stupid. The attention span of an average internet user is now shorter than that of a nervous rabbit on crack. People don’t read anymore – they skim and jump around. No one even buys dead tree books anymore! The sky is falling!

If we look back far enough, we will see that technological progress was always accompanied by these sort of concerns. Socrates worried that reliance on written word will make men forgetful and overly reliant on written sources. Opponents of the printing press complained that wide availability of books will promote intellectual laziness. When radio started becoming popular people predicted similar intellectual malaise.

I usually dismiss such complaints as Luddite ramblings spread by those who fear and lack understanding of the new technology and the new ways of thinking. But these worries about how internet is affecting the inner workings of our minds is not baseless. Take the longish article written by Nicholas Carr for The Atlantic. He makes a really good case for this theory and supports it with copious amounts of quotes and references. It is a great read, but you clearly realize that it is simply a well written opinion piece when you see that Carr has no hard data to support his claims. His case is built around anecdotes and observations.

I’m a scientist, technologist and a geek at heart – I need data. Not statistics, not surveys, not anecdotes. I need data collected in formal double blind studies run multiple times with different population samples in different conditions to rule out simple correlations. Until we have that I will dismiss the “technology is making us stupid” rants are Luddite fear mongering.

Technology is most certainly not making us stupid. While it may be changing the way we are thinking, it is not changing it for worse. If anything, we have been getting progressively smarter as a species in the recent years. Laura Miller in her article for salon.com writes:

IQ tests have to be regularly updated to make them harder; otherwise the average score would have climbed 3 percent per decade since the early 1930s. (The average score is supposed to remain at a constant 100 points.) And IQ measures problem-solving ability, rather than sheer data retained, which has grown even faster over the same interval. Each of us knows many more people and facts than our counterparts of 100 years ago; it’s just that the importance of those people and facts remains somewhat uncertain. Knowing a little bit about Lindsay Lohan and Simon Cowell (two people I recognize despite having no active interest in either one) can’t really be equated with knowing a bit about Marie Curie or Lord Mountbatten. We have more information, but it isn’t necessarily more valuable information.

Modern men are able to store, catalog and process much more information than ever before. We learn much more rapidly than ever before. We adapt to changes much better than our ancestors did. We are much better at looking at the big picture. We excel at identifying patterns in large data sets, processing large amounts of information, multitasking and making decisions based on abstract inputs.

Lamenting that average citizen is not reading as long and as deeply as the prominent thinkers of the past is rather silly. For one, let’s stop comparing apples to oranges. There have been always stupid people on this world who didn’t read books, or try to better themselves intellectually. The only difference is that now they all have Facebook and twitter account – so their ignorance is plainly visible on the interwebs.

Personally, I don’t think that my attention span changed that much. It’s true – I used to read much more books when I didn’t have a computer or internet. But that’s simply because there was nothing else to do. I filled my idle time reading, painting miniatures, drawing and writing down ideas for games and RPG campaigns. Now I spend my idle time reading, blogging, programming, learning new programming languages, playing video games, researching stuff that interests me, reading technology related blogs, learning stuff related to my field, looking up shit for friends and family who do not know the art of Google Foo and etc. I simply have more things to do on in my free time these days – and consequently less time to commit to each of these things.

Still, I have no problems committing to a single thing. I do not suffer from the internet induced ADHD the alarmists seem to be complaining about. People actually joke that I have selective hearing. When I’m working on something I usually tune out all external stimuli and they usually need to call out my name 3-4 times before I actually hear it. Sometimes I don’t even notice people hovering over my desk asking me questions.

This is also the state in which I’m most productive and my work is most enjoyable. I hate being interrupted every couple of minutes because this breaks my flow of thoughts. The more work gets piled on me, the less I can actually get done during the day. Some days I can’t even get into the zone because my work requires me to make constant context switches.

But perhaps I’m different. Perhaps my computer science education and programming background predisposes me for that type of concentration. I also like to read dead tree books. I like stuff that is smart, ambitious and thought provoking. I can’t imagine my life without the internet, but I don’t view it as a distraction. I never really needed software like Writespace or Writeroom to help me concentrate.

Maybe my programming and my blogging here helps to train my brain to stay on the same track for extended periods of time. Do you suffer from the internet induced ADD? Do you have trouble concentrating? Do things like email, twitter and facebook distract you all the time? I can usually tune all of that out. Except my work email and phone of course – I can’t really ignore these, though sometimes I wish I could.

Now before you tell me I’m nuts, let me finish. I do like the Facebook photo sharing in theory. I love the tagging feature for example. You upload bunch of pictures and you simply tag your friends and they are not only notified that these pictures are up, but also have them show up in their picture tab and on their friends’ walls. It is a great idea that was stolen and duplicated by just about every other social network out there. Their system works incredibly well with one exception – picture resolution.

Here is the deal – no matter if you shot your picture with a 3 or 7 megapixel camera and how high the resolution was prior to the upload – after it hits your Facebook page it will look as if you took it on your phone. It will be grainy, fuzzy 600×450 thumbnail of a picture. If you try to zoom into it a bit, you will actually be able to see each individual pixel become a blotchy square. Facebook will shrink and compress the shit out of every single picture you upload to their service.

I don’t really blame them. If I was running that type of service I’d want to make each uploaded picture as small as possible too. I mean, they have to pay for all that hosting with their… Um… Btw, how does Facebook make money again? Advertising? Secretly selling your private info to spammers? I don’t remember – I haven’t seen any outrageously annoying ads on their website lately but I assume they have some. I have Adblock installed so I sometimes forget how shitty internet is to other people. Anyway, however they make their money – they have to stretch that to pay for bandwidth, hosting, frivolous lawsuits and still make profits. Oh, and they have to pay their employees too. So compressing uploaded pictures seems like a great idea. This way they only get to store around 50KB per pic, rather than 3-4MB or more.

This way they get to save money, and you can upload as many embarrassing pictures of yourself that will one day cost you a job or a political career as you want. This makes Facebook a great tool for showing your friends funny pictures you took at the party, or family function. It’s great for showing the world how awesome you are for partying hard 7 nights a week, or uploading nauseating amount of baby pictures that your coworkers will pretend to have seen the next day (but they disabled updates from you a year ago when that little bastard of yours was born). It is the equivalent of showing people the prints of your vacation pictures – they get to look at them, but if they want a copy, you will have to make one for them.

Btw, it’s actually funny how different generations share pictures. When my grandma wanted to show people old pictures she would pull out a leather bound photo album. All the pictures would be meticulously dated, annotated and arranged 4 to a page. She would keep the albums neatly organized by date, occasion and she would sometimes re-arrange them. My parents had few of these albums. Most of our pictures were kept in those paper pouches that you get from the picture place. They would be there along with the negatives, and the original receipt. When they wanted to show people old pictures they would dip into their “pictures drawer” and start fishing for the right pouch. They would pull out one after another, pull out a random picture, inspect it and put the pouch back until they found it.

These days when people want to share pictures, they pull out a laptop, huddle around it and go to fucking Facebook. This works just as well as the old fashioned methods. You can look at the pictures, and even save a copy to your hard drive. But it will be a grainy and over compressed copy. So if you want to use that one epic picture of you and your posse (note, I said posse, not pussy – but if you’d like a picture with your cat, you can use that too, as long as it does not have a badly spelled caption in all caps) as your desktop background you definitely don’t want the Facebook copy. You will need to nag, and bother your friend for about a year to send it to you. The friend will of course have no clue what the hell is your problem, cause “dude, I uploaded it to Facebook”. In the end, you will have to take your laptop to their house and show them how shitty that desktop image will look before they actually get the message and give you the original picture – if they have not deleted it (I mean, it is on Facebook so they can get it from there, right?).

If you actually want to share pictures with people rather than just show them you should probably upload them to some real picture sharing service. There are dozens of them out there – most notable being Flickr (and perhaps Fotki). I’m not saying that you should stop uploading pictures to Facebook. I’m just saying you could try uploading them somewhere else in addition to Facebook. This is why I don’t mind paying for my Flickr account even though I have a Facebook account, and I upload pictures there as well. Yes, I upload most of my pictures twice. Once to Facebook where people will actually see it, and once to Flickr where people can really see it in all of it’s high resolution glory. Flickr also lets me share my photos with those 3-4 people left on earth who have not yet created a Facebook account.

I hope this will help you understand why I always respond with “Dude, Flickr it too” every time someone says “This shit is going on Facebook”. It means that I’d like to actually own a high resolution version of that pic – not the grainy one that looks like you took it with your phone. Actually, scratch that – your phone probably has a 3.2 megapixel camera like mine which means it takes way better pictures than what you see of Facebook.

If you don’t believe me, you can easily verify this for yourself. Pick a blog that you like and dig into it’s archives from 3-4 years ago. Look for video posts. I can almost guarantee that you will find at least one (but likely more) broken embed that looks like this:

Chris Wellons (btw, go read his blog – good stuff) was recently browsing through my own archives and found quite a few dead videos there. These vids just vanished. They were swallowed by the cyberspace void never to be see again. They became ex-videos. They have ceased to be!

What’s worse, I forgot which videos were they to begin with. Some of my old posts would tangentially discuss a video that I embedded but at no point would even hint at what the content was – and I did not remember. So there was no way for me to even go back and re-embed it or post some explanatory blurb. These posts are now mysteries.

Of course, the web being what it is, all online resources are prone to sudden disappearances like that. Broken links to articles, and broken images are also a frequent sight on pages that have not been updated in a while. But I find it that Youtube videos are much more volatile than anything else.

This is probably due to the fact that most of other content people tend to link to is self hosted rather than tied to some free service that needs to react to 10 million wanton copyright infringement complaints each day. For example when I put an image or an article here on Terminally Incoherent it will stay up as long as I keep paying my hosting fee. It may go down every once in a while because my host can’t keep their shit together, but it won’t disappear overnight one day. Even if Dreamhost decides to delete my file due to a complaint (or for fun) I can effortlessly restore it under the same URL if I need to.

Furthermore, we already have established ways to prevent this breakage from happening – or to work around it. Hot-linking to image files is for example, considered rude and inconsiderate (if not dangerous – what if the original author of kitten.jpg you hot-linked replaces it with goatsey or tubgirl out of malice?). It is considered a common courtesy to copy an image, host it yourself and then link back to the original source. This way the author gets the credit, but does not have to suffer the costs of serving the image to your readers.

Similarly, you can avoid making your post incomprehensible after an article you linked to goes away, by simply quoting the source. Textual quotes give the readers the much needed context without forcing them to leave your page to read some long article they may not be that interested in to begin with.

Video hosting these days is almost exclusively done through Youtube like services. You can still self host videos just like images but it is just not as easy. To host a picture, all you need to do is upload it. To host a video, you will usually need to convert it into a FLV, upload it, set up a flash based FLV player somewhere and then combine the two. It takes some work. Or you can just post the video in it’s original form for download, but it will be huge, inconvenient to handle and it will kill your bandwidth. Posting your stuff to Youtube or similar place is really the best the easiest and quickest way you can get your stuff out there.

Once you host the video on their servers however, you are at their mercy. If your vid is taken down, you can’t easily restore it. You can beg them to bring them back, and dispute the take down but that does not always work. If you re-edit the video (for example in response to a complaint, or just to fix it up) you can’t re-upload it with the same URL. Your new upload will get it’s own unique address, an all the existing links will be pointing to the old one – or to a 404 error page if the old vid was taken down for some sort.

Locally caching videos the way we commonly do with images is impractical. Youtube currently does not provide us with an easy way to download the videos it is hosting. While there are many sites that specialize in extracting FLV files out of Youtube pages they are all unofficial. Some video services frown upon that practice, try to interfere with it and explicitly ask you not to grab their source files in the TOS. Most of them go out of their way to make embedding their content super easy for the end user. They provide you with an embed code (often in several formats such as HTML, BBCode and etc) and syndication buttons for popular services.

Because of this, embeding is the accepted method of sharing videos these days. So we have a broken system in place, used by millions of people. We know that this system often results in broken links and that there are no easy to apply and viable alternatives. So what do we do about it?

There exist services that specialize in allowing you to watch “deleted” Youtube videos. or which cache videos on demand, or automatically. but they don’t help us. For one, they are not reliable – some videos are lost to them as well. And in either case, we trade one service for another which may be even less reliable in the future. But even if a video is available via such service, it does not change the fact that original link or embed is broken. That’s really what we are trying to prevent here.

There is really no way for us to stop or avoid Youtube rot – it just happens randomly. You can try to be cautious of what you link to, but you just never know which video will stat up forever, and which will be gone after 2 weeks. Best thing we can do is to try to work around it. Now that we know Youtube rot exists, we can take steps to make our posts and articles less vulnerable to it’s effects.

Here is my proposal: each time you embed a video, include the following in the body of your post somewhere:

1. The exact title of the video as it appears to youtube so that your readers can easily google it once it is gone
2. The name or nickname of the original creator, to help narrowing down the search
3. A brief description of the video contents to provide context for your readers if the video can’t be found elsewhere

When I say brief description, I mean brief. You don’t need to do a House of Leaves type transcript of every scene and every dialog. Just give your readers some idea of what happens in the movie. You can even phrase it in the form of a comment as in “I never knew hat doping menthos into coke and watching it explode could be this much fun”.

Most people don’t do this. They just post the embed code and then comment on it, but they do not take time to properly describe, tag or attribute it. I know, because I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. Think about it though. Next time you include a video in your post, take a 10 seconds to copy and paste the title and the author below it. Take a minute to comment on it’s contents. This will pay off in the long run. In a few years, someone will stumble upon that old post of yours and will still be able to make sense of it. Better yet, thanks to the full title and author they may even be able to locate the vid you mentioned on some other service.