Gnome had Rhythmbox; KDE had Amarok. Mozilla had just released a very early beta of Songbird at the time. And, while it showed great promise, it was plagued by random crashes and a huge codebase. On Windows, I had used Winamp pretty much religiously, followed by Foobar. But on Linux, I was left wanting. 

It's funny because today, I have those same thoughts about Android. There is no good media player on Android. There are a few that are "good enough."  But "good enough" isn't good enough. Google Music is a joke. While the locker service and the web app are excellent, the Android application makes me want to cry. Setting aside bugs(and one of them is a HUGE problem), there are serious usability issues. 

First of all, the Google Music player looks at every audio file on your device, but doesn't allow you to categorize them. So, if you are like me, you have podcasts that you have been syncing to your device. These show up in the Google Music player. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but since there is no way to distinguish them from music, a "Shuffle All" button willlead to these podcasts playing. 

Now if you look at the competitors, of which PowerAMP is a pretty good option, they don't always solve the problem. PowerAMP can't read any information about the music that you have synced with Google Music. Which is a problem for audiophiles like myself that take great pains to make sure all the tags set up properly and album artwork is correct. 

On Linux, many solutions to this problem arose. Banshee is by far the best music application for the average user. Amarok's redesign improved it by quite a bit. But it took years. Android has a far greater adoption rate than Linux did. I think it's time for a music renaissance on Android devices.

1. Dont eat fast food.  - SUCCESS
2. Use only fresh food.  - FAIL
3. Limit myself to one cup of coffee per day - FAIL
4. Buy a car - Pretty much planned for the end of January - SUCCESS
5. Create a web app using HTML5 that is social and uses game mechanics. - FAIL
6. Go Skydiving during the summer - FAIL
7. Learn to Snowboard - FAIL
8. Contribute to an open source project - FAIL
9. Don't worry so much. - FAIL

Giving up fast food was pretty easy. With a supermarket right across the street at work, it was simple to give up fast food. I actually have no desire to eat fast food anymore. My 1 cup of coffee a day limit was successful for a while, but eventually I caved in for more. However, I am only drinking two to three cups a day, which is dramatically fewer than last year. I didn't get to go skydiving, but I picked up rock climbing, which I think is a good substitute(in addition to being a ton of fun).

For 2012, I am going to limit my resolutions. I think keeping it at three or four will make it easier to achieve all of them. So here are my 2012 New Years Resolutions:

1. Launch an HTML5 project
2. Eat Dinner at restaurants not more than twice a week
3. Have my doctor's appointment and be more health conscious
4. Go to The Climbing Wall at least once a week

So there you have it. My short list of the things I want to do right in 2012. 

What Are These Circles About?

Google plus is an application that allows you to share posts, pictures, videos, and links with people on your own terms. It is important to understand that while Google+ is different from Facebook, the concepts are not new. It's all about understanding the purpose of the software. On Facebook, you create and manage connections with your friends. On Google+ you create and manage audiences for the stuff you want to share. This is an important distinction to make. On Google+ you can add someone to your circles. And anything you post to that circle will be visible to them. It's a one way relationship, whereas Facebook is a two way relationship. 

You can think of using Google+ as determining what you want to share with different groups of friends and then sharing it with them. A Circle is a list of people based on how you see them, not on how they see themselves. There have been quite a few people comparing Google Circles to Facebook Groups. However, I think these people are making a terrible comparison that serves to confuse people. Think of Circles like Facebook Lists. The Circles are how you organize your friends, acquaintances, family members, people you follow, etc.

About last night...

So lets say you have some embarassing photos of yourself acting completely obnoxious and out of hand at a bachelor party. It happens, you have a few too many drinks and next thing you know, you wake up in a strange room in Bangkok. Now you probably want to share these photos with the other three members of your wolfpack, but you don't want to share them with anyone else. Well never fear. Google+ to the rescue. 

When you post anything on Google+(status, photos, videos, or links), you will see this underneath the "Share what's new" box:

Right now its set to send the post to my "Friends Circle." If you click on "Add more people," you will be able to add other Circles and even individual people that will be able to view your post. If you want to prevent someone from seeing the post just don't include their circle or their name.

Isn't that brilliant? Facebook's model starts with everything public. It's then up to you to restrict access to your posts. Google+ takes an opt-in approach as opposed to an opt-out one. With Google+ you specifically say which circles you want to share a piece of content with. 

You can also manage these settings when you post photo albums. And the best part about Google+ is that even if you make a mistake and show a photo album to a circle you didn't intend to, you can change the audience after the fact. You can also edit posts after you've made them and control whether people can comment on your posts, or share them to their own stream:

Other Stuff

There are a few things that I need to cover, but don't deserve a whole lot of depth. Perhaps the best feature of Google+ is hangouts. I have a few friends that live across the country from me. They are all on Google+, so we can use the hangouts feature to have group chats. Its basically Skype on steroids for free. What is good about hangouts is that your friends can jump when they see you hanging out with other friends.

The Stream is the The News Feed. "+1" is Google+'s equivalent to the "Like" button. "Share" works like it does on Facebook, except that you can share pretty much anything. If you are familiar with Twitter think of sharing like retweeting. There is no equivalent to posting on someone's wall for Google+. The closest you could come would be to post to your own stream and have that person being the only one who can see it. However, if they haven't added you to a Circle, they won't see it unless they view their "Incoming" stream.

If you have an Android or iPhone, you can get the Google+ app which includes all sorts of features that you might find useful. I can't speak about those Apps because I haven't used them, but it's worth checking out.

What About Facebook?

Google+ has a lot of people talking about the demise of Facebook. The popular argument is, "Facebook took down Myspace. They can fall too." While that is true, Facebook is very established. I think that Google+ is the first legitimate competitor to Facebook. It's clean, simple design and focus on opt-in sharing are just the thing that many Facebook defectors are looking for. A lot of people are tired of Facebook's continuous privacy debacles. That coupled with the ill sentiment that many feel towards Facebook are why I think Google+ has a chance.

My prediction, however, is that both companies will battle it out for market share. The competition will make both products better and in the end we will see two social networks.

We are looking at the Apple/Microsoft rivalry of social networking. And this is just the beginning. 

After watching this video, I wasn't sure how to feel about the future of the platform. The UI is very similar to that of Windows Phone 7. In fact after the new Xbox Dashboard refresh, it's easy to see Microsoft has unified their interface direction. Icons are out and tiles are in. 

I've had some time to contemplate the changes in Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Xbox, and I have some theories and ideas to share.

Javascript Ported To .NET

Many .NET developers were confused and angry about the comments made in this video concerning Windows 8 development. The Windows 8 applications will be fullscreen HTML5 applications running on the machine. This is a sharp difference to the .NET Framework that is used to write most Windows applications today. However, the change does make sense. 

Microsoft is making the same move that Palm made when designing WebOS. Using HTML and Javascript to write applications allows them to appeal to a very large number of developers that know how to use those technologies well. Aside from that, HTML and CSS scale very well between screen sizes and would (theoretically) allow developers to change the interface based on the screen size. 

One important point worth noting is the ability of Windows 8 applications to use the filesystem. It is also reasonable to assume that Windows 8 apps will use other device hardware. Microsoft has said that Internet Explorer would never support the WebGL standard because they can't meet their security concerns. But the news applications should be able to make use of video hardware. 

Since much of the hardware will be available to these apps, I think that Microsoft will be porting Javascript to the .NET framework and releasing APIs to allow Javascript to take advantage of the hardware underneath the operating system. I also think this will alleviate many of the concerns that developers have over the platform. 

Webless Web-Apps

Since all of the applications native to Windows 8 will be written using standard web technologies, it made me think of this post I made about how Web apps should feel native to the operating system. I have always thought that the web would enable incredible applications that connect users to each other in awesome and amazing ways. But I always wanted the experience to be integrated somehow into the desktop shell. 

Microsoft seems to be going with this approach. But I take serious fault with idea that these applications are always going to run in fullscreen(or even just half-screen), is absurd. Windows 8 will give a view for the "legacy" desktop, but I don't think it will be default, or even configurable that way. And Windows 8 apps appear to be completely separate from the Desktop interface. The fullscreen metaphor works well on a 3 inch phone screen or a 10 inch tablet. But what about my 24 inch desktop monitor? The fact is that I don't need a 24 inch weather application. I need a 3 inch weather application that i can drag around and size just like I do windows in ... well Windows 7. 

But I doubt that will happen. I think Microsoft is missing a golden opportunity here to do something great with Windows 8. I will wait to pass judgement until I see the final product. However, I really like where Mac OS is headed. My Macbook is pretty much the only computer I use and I am converting my desktop into a virtual server lab. I really doubt that Windows 8 is in my future. 

My twitter stream will no longer be visible on this site. Instead I am going to be revamping the bio section to include links to my social networking accounts. Be sure to let me know what you think using the disqus commenting system, which I installed last month. 

We have to understand that we aren't going to come up with every good idea. And the ideas that we have can always be improved, most likely by someone who isn't close to the problem/solution. I have started to look at these one-ups as a challenge to do not only what the person said, but do it better. In the end, everyone wins. 

Learn to love the one-uppers. In the end, they make you a better developer/designer/whatever. 

This is the first of a few changes I am working on over the next few weeks.

The possible applications of this much demographic data are endless. With one query to their database you could conceivably figure out the users ages 18-25 who like Twilight, sorted by gender, and grouped by location. Marketing has already become incredibly personalized in the Web 2.0 world. Facebook sells incredibly targetted advertisements. The result is that advertisers know their ad is being shown to someone who is more likely to click on the link. 

But the uses of this data does not stop there. I had a thought the other day that I would like to share. With Religious and Political affiliation information combined with the Status updates that many people post come election time, how difficult do you think it would be to use Facebook to track and understand the American people and get insights on elections and politics in America?

Now a lot of this sounds like something out of a bad science fiction movie. But the fact remains that we as users of Facebook, let Facebook collection the most valuable information store of the digital era. 

So now I leave you with this question: What applications can you see for the growing demographic warehouse that is Facebook.com's servers? 

Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,there have been many members complaining that Facebook is becoming very slow. Records show that the reason is that there are many -active Facebook members and, on the other side, many new Facebook members.

We will be sending this message around to see if members are active or not. If you are active please send to at least 15 other users using Copy+ Paste to show that you are still active. *Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks will be deleted without hesitation to create more space.*

Send this message to all your friends and to show me that your still active and you will not be deleted.

Founder of Facebook,
Mark Zuckerberg .

That's right. The premise is that Facebook is sending a message around in an effort to close inactive accounts so they can free space up on their servers. At first, I wasn't sure why people fell for this. And other than being a minor annoyance for me, I had no stake in trying to understand it. However, after this last time that I received the message, I didn't even have the energy to tell people how dumb the idea was. Instead, I will attempt to put an end to this once and for all by educating my readers about how Web companies work.

Introducing analytics

Every modern website and web company engages in analytics. Analytics is a tool by which a company can track what people do on their site. Its allows companies like Facebook to monitor traffic as well as pretty much anything else that they want.

Facebook often talks about having 500 Million active users. They know this statistic because of analytics software. They also know what users are inactive. Facebook tracks this information as well as other information about your activities on Facebook in order to sell targeted ads that will generate revenue for the company. If Mark Zuckerberg wanted to get rid of all the inactive users, It would be as simple as executing one command. Believe me, I have done this kind of stuff. It is that simple to remove inactive accounts.

But even that is not in Facebook's best interests. Because if your account were inactive, even the possibility that you could come back would mean increased revenue for Facebook. It defies logic to believe this kind of FUD.

I don't understand how people can fall for this. It seems as though people believe that Facebook can tell whether you have sent a message in the last two weeks, but not whether you have logged in. Well let me be clear about this: Facebook knows a great deal about you, including how often you are logged in. 

Really, a message?

Even if Facebook were trying to remove inactive users and were unable to get a list of them via the above mentioned method, using a chain letter to get this information is not just tacky. It is more difficult and expensive than other methods. Facebook has a method of communicating directly with users. They use this method all the time when they release new features. Take a look at the picture below: The picture above shows the new feature dialog box that Facebook uses quite frequently to communicate with their users. If they needed to, it would be easier to post a message to all of their users that says they are performing maintenance on the site and ask you to click a link in order to keep your account active. This would be incredibly simple and cost less money than writing a program to scour the inboxes of all Facebook users to look for a message from Mark Zuckerberg. 

Just create another account, already

Finally, if Facebook really were going through all this trouble and your account were deleted, is it that much work to create a new page. I mean are we that addicted to this site that we can't handle the idea of our user accounts being deleted? 

So, please. Think twice when forwarding one of these messages. The person who wrote these letters is just to take you for a ride. Don't let them. 

I know that I may make some enemies for writing this post. My purpose is not to insult but to inform. I understand that users don't understand how most of the infrastructure of these sites works, and I wanted to just give you some background and context for these chain letters. The bits of humor that I included are not snide remarks, but quips about the situation.