The Gay Cure Appsurdity

I too received the invitation from Change.org to sign the petition to get Apple to remove Exodus International’s “gay cure” app from its store. Now Change has sent a thrilled announcement of victory: after 150,000 signatures, the app has been pulled. Although it’s certainly sad that in 21st century America there are still people who think, or claim to think, that homosexuality is a malady that needs to be cured, it’s also alarming that a business corporation like Apple is given the authority to decide what we can or can’t view on our (their?) iPhones.

The inevitable consequence is to create a moral quagmire and situation of absurdity in which liberals are calling for censorship.

Social networks need their Outlook Express moment

What we are waiting for in social networks is not for some newer, better, more privacy-aware network to replace Facebook (whose account I recently deleted) but a successful desktop or web application that will transparently work with Facebook, Twitter, and all new and aspiring networks.

In email, we had Outlook Express, that was installed automatically in every Windows computer and, till a few years ago, was what the majority of people would use. It didn’t matter what email system they were on; it mattered only that it worked with POP3 and SMTP protocols. When instant messaging came along, there was less uniformity. Sure there were programs like Trillium which could work with a number of accounts. But you would go any public computer and find ICQ, Messenger and a few others competing for attention. Social networks brought new complexity to the communications mess, with most people trying to overcome the problem by standardizing on Facebook. We can only hope that it does not gain the same stranglehold as, say Microsoft Word did for documents.

Yet despite the dominance of Facebook, there are still many other networks that people use, either because they offer a different feature set or occupy a different social niche. And it’s confusing to have to traverse many networks in order to get news, photos and updates from our friends. Some people, still use email in order to tie the strands together through updates to their mail box.

What we need is an interface that goes beyond email in its ability to bring the core functionality (by which I mean posting of statuses, media, links and comments) of multiple networks into the same social stream. It should not, like Facebook, be a network that condescendingly or as an afterthought accepts statuses from other networks, but an independent, universal web or desktop application. Of course, we can’t seriously expect that just one application or protocol will rule the market, but it would be helpful if the major operating systems would create some kind of default social network application like Microsoft did with Outlook Express. There might also be justification for the same application to handle email (as does the web application Threadsy) since it can be useful, when writing an email, to check out our correspondent’s social stream.

The challenge, of course is to create an application that does not grow too complex. But the smartphone and tablet market is helping to bring us application designs that are friendly and accessible.

Ubuntu comes with a simple default application, Gwibber, which allows us to incorporate status streams from at least 3 networks: Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca. Gwibber needs to extend its functionality, and other operating systems need to jump on board and bring us a default client that can handle core functionality of our social networking needs. Meanwhile, the leading social networks could extend their APIs and work together on common protocols, just as the browser companies work together, more successfully than in the past, on web standards. Social networking is too big and is becoming too important a part of our lives to be the province of any one company.

Seeking alternatives to the internet biggies

I’ve been making some headway in a quest to avoid the internet giants and seeking smaller alternatives. Having deleted my personal Facebook account, my next objectives have been Google and Twitter. That’s harder. I’ve been using Google for mail, search, news feeds, photo management, photo storage, IM and probably other things I can’t think of at the moment – both at home and at the office. I won’t be trying to tackle my professional use of any of either Facebook or Google, though I’m in charge of our organizational use of these services (and shifted us over to Google Apps in the first place). But at home I can afford to be innovative.

With regard to email, the first thing was to go over to FastMail.fm. I already had a paid account, but wasn’t really using it. In the past, I used FastMail extensively, and know that it’s a great service. In 2010 it was purchased by Opera, whose browser I’ve also been using lately. Opera have a nice IMAP client, so I can use that in conjunction with FastMail (whose IMAP protocol use is among the best). I simply set up automatic forwarding from my Gmail address, and will be able to gradually phase out Gmail.

A harder thing to forego is Google Reader. Reader is a great news feed aggregator in its own right and, what’s more, syncs with many of the other good feed readers on PC and my Ipod. One of my favorites is Feedly. There’s no service quite comparable to Feedly – a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome/Chromium. But Feedly does not work in Opera. So if I want to both use Opera and ditch another Google service, I need an alternative. I’ve tried Opera’s feed reader and don’t like it. Among its problems is not properly naming the source of the news feed being read. I’ve tried Liferea, a Gnome desktop application. This is better, but very slow (I have quite a lot of feeds). The best I’ve found so far is Lazyscope, a cross-platform Adobe Air application. Lazyscope mashes together both Twitter and news feeds, blurring the difference between them. It also offers a quick subscription to new feeds, and some nice sharing features.

A problem with the services mentioned (other than Feedly) is that they do not offer sharing with non-proprietary microblogging services. This matters to me because I would like to cross-post to Identi.ca. When I’m not reading news feeds, I now use Gwibber for this purpose – or TweetDeck or Spaz. Any of these are able to read and post to Identi.ca. Gwibber is my favorite since it is a natural part of Ubuntu’s operating system. So if I’m using Lazyscope, I don’t get to post to Identi.ca.

There’s no question that outside of Facebook, Twitter dominates the microblog market, but as other services like Identi.ca and WordPress use the Twitter Api, and as microblogging clients like Tweetdeck, Seismic, Spaz, Gwibber and others make it possible to integrate alternative services into our Twitterstream, our dependence upon Twitter can be reduced.

For search, a viable alternative is Blekko. I’ve written to their support now, to ask if they can provide a search string suitable for the Opera browser. [Update: they got back to me really quickly. The search string is http://www.blekko.com/ws/%s]

I am still considering what service to use for uploading photos. More on this later.

[update] OK for photos, I’ve decided to use the same solution as for email. Fastmail subscriptions come with additional file storage space. Their standard $20 subscription has 100 mb – about enough for 1,000 photos at 640 x 480. Another $10 buys 1 GB more. Fastmail’s photo gallery is more attractive than Picasaweb, Flickr and Facebook, and even allows a custom stylesheet. There are no commenting or sharing features built in. If I wanted a more social experience, I might choose my.opera.com (an all-round blogging platform), which comes with 2 GB of free storage.