Whatsapp listens. Now we have the old text statuses and the new snapchat ones.

 In a recent blogpost I mentioned that the new whatsapp statuses were hugely unpopular here in southern Africa and that the change was an attempt by facebook (whatsapp's owner) to replicate snapchat (which facebook failed to buy). I then--as I'm sure did thousands of others--complained to whatsapp about the change through their beta app.



Well, now we have the old text statuses back as well as the new snapchat ones. if you go to your own Settings you can set your own text status just as before; and if you check your friends' View Contact you can see their status under the heading About and phone number. According to reports the company says that Android updates that reflect the statuses change will roll out next week; Apple updates will follow after that.

Whatsapp Statuses and the Coming Empire

I use whatsapp beta, so I get the crap good stuff first...                      

Here in southern Africa many households don't, and have never had, landlines but cellphone use is part of everyone's life. I surprised myself and most of my friends by buying a cellphone almost as soon as they became available (back in 1998). It was a Siemens handset. Despite the predictions of the so-called experts, MTN, Vodacom and the rest took off like rockets. In some African countries cellphone saturation is now running at over 80%.
    That's amazing, but it's very costly and there are many who argue that the introduction of cellphones compounded the already dire poverty situation in many countries.
   Anyway, I thought whatsapp was great until recently. See, I tried out whatsapp as soon as I heard about it circa 2011. At the time we were all using Mxit because we didn't want to pay through the nose using MTN. Of course once we started with Mxit we got hooked on Mxit's little red hearts that flashed and winked and glowed as we sat up chatting late into the dark, and the app's sounds and pix. Mxit was a cool app. But whatsapp had the potential to be cooler and we didn't have to ditch the emoticons either.
   As with all of these apps, the takeup at first was slow--you can't chat with your friends until they're using the app as well. At first we android users all had BBM envy; but whatsapp arrived at the right time. (When BBM was finally made available for non-blackberry users it was too late.) .
  Then facebook recently bought whatsapp. We feared for the worst; we liked our whatsapp the way it was. Facebook tried to buy snapchat but failed. So whatsapp statuses have become snapchat-like. At the same time, facebook's messenger now wants to take over your standard sms stuff in addition to the already popular facebook messaging.                      
We are being encouraged to send a facebook message instead of a standard sms instead of sending a standard sms, use whatsapp for snapchatting, and whatsapp for calling: an integrated solution to all our needs, and relatively inexpensive. In fact a boon to end users. But why? Is facebook trying to muscle cellular networks aside?
   In a sense, yes. Both facebook and google want the world to have free Wi-Fi so that they can grow the world's biggest consumer base--which will be their own users, i.e., us. It's a smart plan, and working so far.  It is obviously a plan for empire-building.
   Why should we be worried? (Apart from having no private identities, that is.) Are we under threat?
   Not directly no. Not at this moment. It's not average people who are threatened but every traditional status quo, including governments. Why are cellular networks so expensive? Because 'esteemed investors' can harvest money from them. That is under direct threat. For example, MTN's biggest money harvester in Africa has always been sms messaging. With the Internet they are now trying to mine it from data; wi-fi is cheaper but few have access to wi-fi as compared to cellular. It's all about money. Cellular networks get it directly. Data uploads as well as downloads, so streaming of media, especially youtube videos, consumes a lot of data. People don't think they're downloading, because it goes into a temporary file,  but they are. Facebook can do it cheaper and at the moment we're tempted to think they're actually on our side.

         

Heads & Tails (1.2)

Facebook has now embraced the Tor network

HUMAN LIFE is full of ironies. A friend of mine, who lives in Europe, is terrified of identity theft and religiously shreds his snail mail and deletes his email. Another friend, this time in the states, is angry at his government's Big Brother approach to citizen management. He's especially upset by the NSA's mass-monitoring of electronic communications. But of course it's a world-wide phenomenon: under the umbrella of 'anti-terrorism', governments everywhere have been inventing ways to spy on people, and been trying to control what a person can or can't do on the once-freer Internet. As an unexpected result, we are being collectively taught to think like activists and hackers.

Now private networks and the murky dark corners of the web are beginning to appeal to us all -- those of us with dark hearts and also those of us who breathe in the light.

The TOR network is not new (it already has around 2.5 million daily users) but it has been gaining popularity for a while, especially because of governmental attention paid to wikileaks, sharing sites, and the emerging acceptance of bitcoin. This morning TOR became famous (or infamous) because of the news that Facebook has embraced it.

TOR is an anonymising platform, one designed to protect you whenever you go online. Your name and details can be hidden, as well as your address and location. By address I mean not only where in the world you are, but also the mac address of your machine.

The accommodation by Facebook would seem at first to be odd, since surely the whole purpose of using social media is to be social; but there is of course a difference between social and sociable.

If you're interested in trying out the TOR browser, I suggest you download and install a complete OS that sets it all up for you: Tails. [This is why this article is named Heads and Tails (1.2); Heads is Facebook and Tails is... duh...]

Tails and the new Facebook portal work fine together. Tails is a live OS: it's designed to run from a flash drive and when you go offline it removes all traces of your online activity. Tails can be found here.

The Net Generation (2)

The new generation, the Net generation, aren't up on national Cultural Literacy because traditional culture doesn't really interest them. If you ask them to name Swaziland's current Cabinet, for example, they mostly have no idea; nor do they know who signed the American Declaration of Independence or who Genghis Khan was. They know who Gaddafi is, but not because they know about Libya--most couldn't find the country even on a map. They know about Gaddafi because he's rich, famous, and in the headlines now. This generation truly lives in an electronic, networked, Global Village. They can complete an Eminem quote, but not one by Churchill; they know what Rihanna's latest hairstyle is but can't tell you about Renoir; they know Trump makes money but not how. They think connectedly, not individually; globally, not locally. But contrary to doomsaying opinion they haven't lost their way; they have a genuine sense of identity, but it's collective rather than individual; international, rather than national; it's immediate rather than considered-- connected via Facebook and Mxit and the Net rather than by landlines, PCs or snail mail. And the old conundrum expressed in Pilate's (who's he?) question, What is truth? is more pertinent than ever, for what now is the difference between gossip and information, between genuine and false? All of it is viral. Is it true because it's in a book? Or because it's on the web? Or simply because so many are saying it?

Swaziland has caught the flu

These days news is viral: Lady GaGa just needs to fart & the whole world knows within minutes. So, as soon as tweets said that the IMF wanted the lilangeni delinked from the Rand & people perceived that Swaziland was in crisis, then immediately SD <i>was</i> in crisis. Everybody began disinvesting in the country. Donne's 'no man is an island' now applies equally to nations & it hits like a hurricane.

posted from Bloggeroid

Peppermint vs Jolicloud

Ok, I've been trying out these two implementations of a Cloud-based OS, and I like them both. It's amazing how quickly my thinking has adjusted to their different designs. My verdict right now is to use Peppermint for laptops and Jolicloud for networks--but that decision is based primarily on the fact that I can't get Jolicloud to install on anything other than my Samsung NC10, where it works just fine.

Both use online suites of apps-- Google's; and, in Jolicloud's case, Adobe's air.

They differ in interface design and underlying technologies.

Both are built on Ubuntu, but Jolicloud looks more like an iPhone desktop than Ubuntu. Peppermint looks like Linux Mint. Rather than a browser, dedicated panes are used to run web applications: Peppermint uses Mozilla's Prism; Jolicloud uses Google's Chrome.

I have had no problems at all so far with either system (although I'm using the Peppermint respin rather than the initial buggy offering).

Which will be the winner? probably something else entirely, but these are showing the way to go. Recommended.

Google Chrome: Browser Wars (contd)

With the latest devbuild, I can see that Chromium/Chrome (Google's new-style browser) is getting stronger; and I must say that I like it. It's simply designed, but elegant in a zen way; and the search+address bar feels so right, so intuitive that browsing becomes a much better experience. Already I'm using this browser on a daily basis, even though there's so much unfinished about it that most people would probably think it isn't worth the bother. [Wait till they try it though.] In short, this is shaping up to be a killer app!

Browser Wars 2008

The browser wars are hotting up & they're interesting to watch. Those who are even slightly savvy about the Internet and its tech know that Microsoft's IExplorer is definitely not the browser to choose for any reason--it's slower than the competition, bulky, less intuitive and of course the one most likely to spawn viruses. It's also, natch, the most-used browser of all since choosing an alternative requires a bit of extra effort (IE comes bundled as the built-in virus portal with every Windoze PC sold).
   There's a good choice of alternatives available now: Safari (Apple's own and the one resident on Nokia phones); Firefox (version 3 is imminent); and Opera are the three big ones. Then there's Flock, which is radically different. In addition a number of experimental fly-fasts are available: Shiira and Sunrise are the first to come to mind; and then Camino...
   What to choose? Well Flock is the must-have if you're a blogger or facebook/twitter fan, and since it's built upon Firefox, Fox plug-ins usually work on Flock too--a big plus. But it's wise to never stick to one. I'm posting this from Flock, but Safari's also up-and-running right now in the background.
   My hardware is an Apple G4 laptop running OSX Tiger.

Blogged with the Flock Browser