Cruel Intentions - The perils of social networks

Fascinating documentary on ABC last night (link), showing what happens when teens get to play on the Internet without Adult supervision. As the parent of two teenage boys the show was very revealing. I’m fortunate to have boys and not girls, and I’m also fortunate to understand how the technology works, and I’m careful to ensure that I’m “present” with my kids everyday without infringing on their privacy.

What I saw last night amazed me. Kids today have too many electronic gadgets to communicate with, and way too much time on their hands. These online social networks are removing something very precious…. “personalization”.

Today it’s all about IM’ing, cellphone camera snapshots which are then Photoshop’d to add new and even meaner context. Kids have no idea that the millisecond after they hit the send key there message is in cyberspace forever. They also have no idea how much damage an email or IM message can do. One child hung himself he was so depressed.

Years ago when we were releasing mod_gzip I got involved in some really brutal email flame wars on the Apache forum. I learned something really important from all of that… there are times email is useful as a communication medium and other times it’s really destructive. I no longer engage in email flame wars… if I have an issue I pick up the phone and arrange a face to face meeting.

Everyday the world becomes a little more desensitized due to electronic communications. Maybe it’s time to get back to good old fashioned, one on one, face to face communication. And when you do, start every conversation respectfully. The results will be a lot different.

The Empire Stikes Back

Just got finished taking Windows Vista RC1 for a test drive around the block. It’s going to be good. I started the install at 2:02AM this morning… I logged into Vista at 2:31AM, just 31 minutes. Not bad. It didn’t recognize my sound card and substituted for my video, however apart from that everything worked fine.

First thoughts… it sure is pretty. In fact it’s downright amazing. There is eye candy as far as the eye can see. I love the Gadgets on the side and the desktop backgrounds are breathtaking. Performance is also pretty good. MSIE loads in about a second (my PC is a 3 GHz dual core with 2GB of RAM and a 128MB video board). In general the system already feels very “snappy”. In fact more snappy than good old XP. MSIE rocks, I downloaded and installed FireFox which worked just fine, but it looked anemic when compared with I.E.

Microsoft is tying everything into Windows Live… it’s going to be the new place to go. They’re doing the same thing with their mobile effort as well. In short 5 years from now we’re all going to be using this system and I bet a good chunk of the user base will be going through Live.

Now compare this with offerings from Google and Yahoo. Sorry folks it’s just not in the same ballpark. Google attempt at Office is not going to fly. Why not? Because folks, it’s all about the User Interface and simply too many people use office and have got used to how it works. If they (Microsoft) would beef up the grammar checker nobody would ever switch. Yahoo and Google cannot compete effectively on the desktop. Microsoft is responding to the customer and tying everything together in one neat package with a consistent user interface.

This vision is going to take years to become reality, however I would no longer bet against Microsoft. Sure they are number 3 in search, which means that they are going to compete until they are number 1, and they have something none of the others have, the desktop AND the mobile device AND the UMPC. Tie that together with a kick ass web presence and the result is that the disturbance in the force, is the “Empire striking back”.

Now all it needs is Me?