Category Archives: Internet

Fixing Flickr

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Flickr, the photo sharing site, launched in February, 2004. I created my account in May, 2005, and have been a user ever since. I have more than 1,800 photos in my account which isn’t a large number. That’s because I don’t upload every photo I take. I’ve never used Flickr as a “warehouse” for storing photos. I put stuff on Flickr that I want to share, although I tend to use my blog for that these days. My photos have been viewed more than a million times (collectively) but I doubt that’s a big number, comparatively speaking.

For most of its existence, Flickr has been owned by Yahoo! who fucked it up in ways too numerous to mention. Earlier this year Flickr was sold to SmugMug, a paid image sharing, image hosting service, and online video platform. The new owners are making changes and a bunch of the 800,000 Flickr users are freaking out. They’ve been getting unlimited storage for free and in a couple of months that ends. The new limit is 1,000 photos or upgrade to a Pro account for $50 a year. (Which I did back in 2005)

The vast majority of Flickr users are not using the service as a “photo sharing” platform. They’re taking advantage of the free terabyte of storage to warehouse and back-up all of their photos. Fun while it lasted but guess what? Internet companies make changes like this all the time. I think this is a logical move will keep Flickr financially healthy. Others think it will kill the service. Time will tell.

What my Pro account give me under this new plan?

  • One of the many dumb things Yahoo! did was make Flickr subscribers get a Yahoo! account and use that to log into their Flicker account. Cluster. Fuck. That ends soon and we can use any email account to log in.
  • Unlimited storage
  • Ad-free browsing. I would HATE having ads on my Flickr pages
  • Better stats to see which of photos are most viewed. Admittedly not a big deal to me.
  • Better support when I need it.
  • Longer (10 min) videos. Up from 3 minutes.

Free is not a business model. And if a dollar a week is too pricey for you… sorry, Charlie. I’m happy to pay for services I like. For those who aren’t, there are free services like Google Photos.

“Social media is making the world a better place”

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I gave up Twitter two years ago, never did Facebook and said goodbye to Google+ recently. Social media seemed only slightly less afflictive than opioid addiction. But this post by Kevin Drum offers a glimmer of hope:

The internet boasts an immediacy that allows it to pack a bigger punch than any previous medium. But this is hardly something new. Newspapers packed a bigger punch than the gossipmonger who appeared in your village every few weeks. Radio was more powerful than newspapers. TV was more powerful than radio. And social media is more powerful than TV.

Broadly speaking, the world is not worse than it used to be. We simply see far more of its dark corners than we used to, and we see them in the most visceral possible way: live, in color, and with caustic commentary.

The money quote: “If you want to make things better, you first have to convince people that something bad is happening. Social media does that.”

Google+ going away

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It’s that scene where all the seniors are gathered at the high school hangout, just before everyone heads off to college or the Army or a full-time job at Wal Mart. Everyone promises to keep in touch but knows they won’t. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made on Google+. I got in the car or on a plane to go meet some of you f2f.

But like everyone else, I could see this coming. I’m guessing a lot of folks will swing over to FB and reassemble there. Not an option for me. In fact, this was my last little toe-in-the-social media-water. I’ve been spending time one a Land Rover forum and feel comfortable with the focused/moderated environment. No politics, no ranting… just guys talking about their trucks.

I guess I’m still a little surprised nobody has figured out a way to do a paid social media platform. Sure seems like there would be a lot (okay, enough) people willing to pay, say, twenty bucks a year for an ad-free site. But no such thing exists as far as I know.

Goodbye DSL

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I remember my excitement, all those years ago (2005), when I upgraded from dial-up internet access to “high speed” DSL. It was never great but it was the best thing available (we can’t get cable). The local phone company (CenturyLink) advertised 10mbps download (1mbps up) but we never got more than 8 and that was good enough. But for the last six months we’ve had continual problems. Good fast connection one minute… then almost nothing five minutes later. Lots of phone calls and two visits by technicians (image of large man scratching his head) and the service is still unreliable. So today is the day we cancel the service (which only costs $45/mo).

I’ve replaced it with AT&T’s wireless internet service. I’m now getting — on average — 35mbps down and 5mbps up. More than 4x faster! And almost certainly more reliable.

I’m paying $60 per month for the service and that gets me 50gb of data a month. Because we’re also DirecTV customers, they give us an additional 50gb. 100gb/mo should be enough but if we run over, we have an additional 30gb on our phones which can serve as wifi hotspots. I’ll monitor this for a few months to see what our usage looks like. DSL is ancient tech and while it has been mostly a good experience, I happy to see it go.

UPDATE 10/17/18: Or maybe not. Looks like we’ve used three quarters of our 100gb just halfway through our billing period. The overages could mount up fast. And we just don’t want to have to watch and budget. So we’re going back to DSL and will learn to live with slow speeds and unreliable service. But hey, I remember dial-up.

DSL vs. AT&T Wireless

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We have a DSL line from our local telco for internet access. We pay $45 a month for 10 megabits download speed (never get more than 8) and less than 1 megabit upload speed. Not great but all that’s available where we live.

Been having problems for the last couple of weeks with technicians coming up to check lines, etc. Keep thinking they have it fixed but the problem persists so we’ve been using the hotspot feature on our iPhones. Yesterday I stopped by the local AT&T store to talk about our data plan to avoid getting surprised by a huge bill.

We’re currently paying $130 a months for 15gb that Barb and I share. Historically, we use very little of this but if we start making heavy use of the hotspot feature that could change. Without getting any further into the weeds here, I upgraded to an “unlimited” data plan for $150 a month. But the plan lets us stop paying for HBO and we get some other discounts so the faster service winds up costing me less than I was paying.

I’d never checked to see what kind of speeds I get from our AT&T wireless so I figured this was a good time to take a look. We’re getting 18 mbs down and 5.6 mbs up. More than twice as fast as the DSL line!

We don’t stream a lot of movies but do have Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV. I’ll keep the DSL service for a few months while we monitor our wireless data use, but I’m thinking I can adios the DSL.

This is might be more noteworthy to me because I remember the dial-up modem days. 2400, 14,400, 56K. Dark days? An exciting time? Could never have imagined I’d be able to connect to the internet with a mobile phone. Could never have imagined a mobile phone.

The Amazon Brand

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Overheard a woman talking to a friend this morning say something like “I bought it from Amazon.” I’m pretty sure whatever she purchased wasn’t manufactured by Amazon. But the Amazon brand has pretty much gobbled up the branding value from all the stuff they sell. I get as much value from Amazon as from the company that made the whatever. More? Has any company ever owned so much mind-space? Maybe Sears back in the mail order catalog days?

Government Websites

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Logged in to my Medicare account recently to update password. They used to require an update every six months but got so many complaints they dropped that requirement. After half a dozen unsuccessful attempts to create a new PW I started a chat with a support person. She began by informing me the password guidelines on the Medicare.gov website are wrong. Why are they there if they are wrong? She had no idea and gave me some different guidelines:

1. You should create a NEW password that is 8 – 16 characters in length.
2. The password must not include # or &
3. Must include at least one letter, number and at least one special character such as (@) ($) (%) [but not at the end of the password!]
4. Cannot be the same as your username.

Additional guidelines: please do not follow the creation guidelines in the system at this time. You will need to use at least one capital letters, four numbers and a special character however; you may not use a number or symbols at the beginning or at the end of the password. An example of a good password would be “Home1234$Home.” Alternatively “Red2015$car” You will need to use a minimum of three numbers in the middle.

These didn’t work either so I wound up on the phone with a gentleman who explained these guidelines are not right either. (“Sorry about that. Ha ha!”) Wound up creating a new account with a really lame-ass password.

ME: “Should I change this from time to time?”
SUPPORT: “I wouldn’t.”

Chaos Monkeys

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In a recent Rolling Stone piece Matt Taibbi described Antonio Garcia Martinez as “the most interesting and damaging defector to have ever left the ranks of Facebook. An iconoclastic combination of Travis McGee and Michael Lewis, he is a former physics Ph.D. candidate from Berkeley who worked at Goldman Sachs before his two years at Facebook.”

The Travis McGee reference intrigued me so I bought Martinez’ book (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley). Only halfway through but can safely say it is one of the best books I’ve read about Silicon Valley. Martinez’s writing style reminds me of Taibbi and he makes the world of tech start-ups read like a thriller. I’m at the part of the book where he’s just gone to work for Facebook:

“Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo. Which, if you think about it, is much scarier than simple greed. The greedy man can always be bought at some price or another, and his behavior is predictable. But the true zealot? He can’t be had at any price, and there’s no telling what his mad visions will have him and his followers do. That’s what we’re talking about with Mark Elliot Zuckerberg and the company he created.”

If The Social Network is how Facebook started, Chaos Monkeys is what it became. Nobody knows what it will become.

Rolling School Buses

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“Google today announced an expansion of its Rolling Study Halls initiative to over 16 additional school districts, giving “thousands” of students access to Wi-Fi and Chromebooks on their buses. […] Google contributes mobile Wi-Fi routers, data plans, and Chromebook devices. Each Rolling Study Hall also has an “onboard educator” who’s able to provide direct assistance.”

Distance yourself from social media

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That’s Mike Elgan’s advice and it resonates for me. If someone tells me they get their news from Fox and Breitbart that affects my opinion of that person. They don’t give a shit about my opinion, I get that. And if they spend hours a day on Facebook and Twitter (as I did for years), that tells me something about them.

Events this week prove that a social network’s public reputation can sour so suddenly and so thoroughly that, if you’re active on that network, it rubs off on you and damages the reputation of you or your company.

Elgan advises a return to older technologies.

The new imperative is to build your own social networks. Re-embrace older technologies that keep you in control of the access you have to fans, customers, colleagues and the public. […] Favor the content subscription model. Pour your energies and budgets into email newsletters, blogs with RSS feeds and podcasts.