libraries are hip with the youth

libraries are hip with the youth but not in the way you might think. reuters is reporting on a study today finding generation Y as the new, hot age group using libraries. but more interestingly they’re there to use the computers.

i can picture a day when most books are digital. then a library can be small and serve even more content then ever. librarians are still needed to help people find and research topics, but hey, no more late fees! that vision must certainly be in the minds of the Google Library Project. i’m glad they’re leading a charge in this direction and taking the initial heat with book publishers. i also appreciate that this will be super disruptive to book publisher’s business models and cause some pain in the transition. It’s a net positive to me and i feel it’s just a matter of time really. as more and more things become digital, there’s added value for us all. but it up-ends existing situations. onward!

comcast frustrations

ok, so i just swapped out a comcast modem and used their little Comcast Wizard Installer to setup the new modem on my Mac. this was necessary so the modem would have its customer account setup properly. but for some incredibly dumb reason the installer didn’t just setup the modem, it modified my local computer’s network configuration for no good reason and in doing so it broke my Airport menu status icon completely. afterwards it just read “Airport: Not configured” even with the network connected and working fine. also, i could no longer use an “Automatic” network location in the System Configuration; every attempt to do so would automatically switch me to some new and pointless “Comcast” location it created. I say pointless because the network is setup to be a generic, automatically configured wireless network - no special settings at all. no configuration needed, you know? so why are they modifying my local settings in any way at all?

this is the kind of behavior that really used to piss me off when i worked in apple’s os engineering group: poorly behaved developers writing shoddy software causing needless aggravation.

anyway, after finding their uninstaller on the CD and uninstalling their software everything is back to normal. but i really want to know what they were doing that caused so much odd behavior. also of note (and so you gentle reader who got here via google can find this page), under status for my wireless connection it no longer said “Airport” but instead said “PCI Ethernet ‡±¨Ä, Port 2″ (yes, those garbage characters were really what showed up). that was disconcerting to say the least. what was the installer doing?!

i want the hour of my life back, comcast. thank you for your needlessly poor customer experience. i’m available for some consulting, by the way. i’d be happy to tell you in more detail how to improve this mess. please, let me help you.

there’s some egg on your face(book)

funny, the same social networking features that have made facebook take off - like their mini-feed and affordance to know what your friends are doing - made it easier for a petition drive to counter their new beacon feature. facebook reversed today and announced they’re going to an opt-in model instead.

if it weren’t for the negative consequence, this would be a great example of how passionate users get involved in your site and participate in your design. but because it was after the fact, they really blew it. but i’m not sure this feature was ever tenable. inviting discussion before hand wouldn’t have helped. starting opt-in and then switching to opt-out probably would have the same issues. this really was a marketing problem i think, they didn’t predict the vehemence of the reaction in their customer base and they should have.

i wonder how age ranges correlate to this. were the millenials just fine with beacon?

personally, i find the beacon feature onerous because it violates an unspoken need for control of my identity. if i go to a movie, i don’t want all my friends to know automatically. what if i’m embarrassed about a particular kind of movie interest. say, hypothetically, i like chick flicks. the announcement of that fact to my social scene could be devastating or at least generate negative social capital for me. the site really needs to help me manage my identity, not poke holes in it.

(thanks to mike monteiro for the awesome image mashup)