2011 in retrospect

Looking back at the year this last day of the year the following tech stories stood out.


Social Media fueled Arab Spring

This year social media like Facebook & Twitter truly became mainstream, they are no longer something the tech elite use. They have also reached a critical mass that allows an innocuous looking post to to spread across the society like a wildfire and snowball into something thats capable of bringing down decades old deeply entrenched autocracies.



Evolution of more natural UX

This year also saw maturing of technologies like Voice control (think Siri), Touch (think iPhone) & gestures (think XBox Kinect) becoming more mainstream and ubiquitous. This sets the stage for changing the way we all  interact with devices.. We are already seeing some of these technologies that matured in the mobile space bleeding into mainstream OSes (Mac os Lion & Metro UI in Windows 8). If the trajectory continues very soon we will be using touch/gestures/voice control on most of our devices at home.



Rise of HTML5

This year saw Adobe finally concede defeat and adopt HTML5 as the defacto standard in developing UI. This is a great news for developer community as they can focus on building great apps and not worry about rehashing the same app using different technology stacks. Dream of having the same app run on the  phone, computer, TV, set-top boxes, tablets etc came much more closer this year.



Rise of Android

Android has finally matured to be an formidable competitor to the iOS ecosystem. Being an open platform facilitates this wide adoption. Today android has become the defacto  platform to build an smart device on. Apple due to its lead had locked up the supply chain, meaning that competitors had to either compromise on quality or have their wares at higher prices. But seeing Amazon enter this market in a big way with its “razor and blade” strategy was an interesting development. Amazon has a wide variety of content and thus can afford to subside its devices and thus pose first serious challenge to Apple.



Passing away of Steve Jobs

Steve’s life can be summed up nicely by borrowing one of the Apples motto “think different”. By doing so he fundamentally changed multiple industries, created new ones and forced others to imitate him. In my opinion his biggest contribution to the tech world was as he called: merging liberal arts with technology. One can argue has made technology much more accessible to the masses and caused the first four things listed above to happen. Dots are there to connect him to arab spring!  His passing away brings an era to end, but hopefully his legacy will live on and the lessons learned will be built upon and thus, the technology will continue to be simplified, digested and prepared for mass consumption.

think about "checking out" instead of "checking in"

Popularity of social sites has been making us obsessive compulsive share everything maniac.  We all know please who have to broadcast to the world by "checking in" via foursquare/gowalla (oh well)/facebook places and then cross post it to twitter/facebook/google+ etc, all the time. This cross posting of the checkin activity to twitter makes it very public. just try searching for 4sq on twitter.

Everytime  a "checkin" is broadcasted to the world, in addition to  telling everyone where you are, it also tells the world where you are  NOT i.e. your house. You might already be sharing the  location of your house via unkowingly geotagging the pics/tweets etc. Sites like PleaseRobme are  popular for raising awareness on this issue.

I do understand the urge to share. Winning mayorships, badges, points can be addictive. Moreover foursquare and shopkick have been experimenting by making the checkins earn real dollars by giving coupons/discounts.

Here is my attempt to making checking a little  "safer" :

1.  Check out instead of checking in :  Unless  your friends use your foursquare feed to run into you, checking out of a place is usually safer than checking in without loosing any functionality. You still get your mayorships, badges, points etc without revealing the estimated time you will be at the exact location. eg. your checkin at a movie theatre/restaurant ties you to the location for a few hours vs checking out

2. Dont cross post your checkins via twitter/facebook etc. Believe me there is nothing more irritating seeing the twitter feed full of crap like that. It makes your checkins a little less public

3.  Think about making your checkins private.  this ensures your location is available to your "friends" and not anyone at internet.

Reenable your kids locked google accounts.

Google does not allow any new accounts for kids under 13. If you have managed to get an account for them  perviously (say email) , and they try to activate any of the other services (say youtube or g+) google will ask for a birthdate, entering it will immediately lock the google account itself ( thus locking them out of all services). They site

Under our policies, Google doesn't allow users who are under the age of 13 to have Google Accounts, unless they are using Google Apps for Education accounts through their school. This is similar to a lot of online services, as it's very complicated for many providers to offer better solutions for children that meet the relevant regulations. It's not as simple as just asking a parent for consent to let their child have an account -- there are associated implications for data and privacy involved.

One of the reason for google to this is Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Its important to note that Yahoo does provide a way for kids to have accounts via the Yahoo Family Plan.

Once Google locks the account, the only way to unlock the account is by proving your kids age by one of the following ways

• Credit card verification
• Uploading a scanned govt issued ID
• Snail mailing a copy  govt issued ID

If your kid does not meet the age requirements obviously none of these are going to help. I did find myself in this situation when I tried to sign up my 7 yr old son to his youtube account so he can post videos that I encouraged him to create.

I decided to give credit card verification a try. I put in my age and name and credit card details and like magic my kids account was unlocked.  So looks like the credit card that is needed for verification need not be in the kids name! BTW google will charge $0.30 for this trouble. It was well worth it compared with the trama my son was going through for loosing his email & blog accounts.

So how do you use your "likes" "favorites" "+1" "digs" etc.

The social apps today want us to  “interact” with them by encouraging us  to click on a button labelled “dig”, “+1”, “like” “favorite” etc.

Clicking on them is beneficial to at least 2 of the 3 parties involved.

Poster :
   - It increases his/her “social influence”
   - It validates the “social graph”
   - “Retweeting/Reposting” can increase the traffic which could lead to increasing ad revenue
   - Provides ego boost

Service Provider
    - Helps profile the person interacting based on context information of the link/post
    - Marketing the social profile to its consumer or targeting ads/marketing campaign/research etc
    - Helps profile the poster by examining the social network
    - Help gauge the social acceptance of the topics/things discussed in the post

Clicker
    Its kinda hard to come up with the reasons on how clicking on “like”/+1/favorite helps the clicker. here is what I could come up with
    - Makes him/her socially relevant
    - Might “believe” in getting profiled in order to see more relevant ads etc.

How I want to use the “like” button (just like I use the favorite button on twitter)

Today I get majority of my tech news via twitter and social news via Facebook. Most of the news items in both of my streams are interesting links to other websites/videos etc. Thus for me Facebook & twitter stream  largely define the slice of web I surf. The problem with both of them is that they are a non stop stream of information which is almost like drinking from a fire-hose. If I do not have the time to follow the link posted, chances are that the link along with the post will fade away from my stream within hours. The “half life” of a link shared in a social media is just a few hours.

Thus if I am trading my privacy by clicking on a link, I expect this in return :

I want the service provider to provide me with the history of all the links I have interacted with. Thus I can go back and preview them at leisure. Twitter does this already and I use it extensively, both on my macbook & my iPhone. I check twitter often and “favorite” the posts catch my eye and then later in the evening or week when I have time I read the linked post/watch the video what ever. This is not possible on Facebook unfortunately, so I use service like read it later. using a browser plugin makes it easy, but still is not seemless. Also as its not supported natively, and doesn’t work on my mobile phone where I do most of my facebooking.



Hopefully Facebook will see value in making it available to us and not just the paying customters!