KINGSQUEAK.ORG & KC2RGW.COM

What is it?

Google+ if you aren’t already aware is Google’s latest social networking and app consolidation effort. I’ve been on it now for a couple weeks I think.

Why bother?

Well, simply put, I do not like or trust Facebook at this point. FB has an established track record of trying to mislead or trick its users into exposing posts and other content they have entered into their service.

It would be one thing if a user of a given product didn’t configure the product properly and exposed their content. However, in the case of FB, even if the user takes care to arrange all of their account privacy settings, the company has changed the function of the privacy settings several times resulting in exposed content if the user hadn’t noticed the changes and made the corrections. FB never discloses the ‘risks’ of their changes which leads me to quickly conclude they intend on the results.

This is unacceptable. A user shouldn’t have to be constantly vigilant to maintain the expected level of ‘privacy’ of their content as a development staff of hundreds makes random changes to a code base.

The FB motive in this appears to be to expose user data to the internet at large. This is very different from what I’ve so far seen from Google.

Why not Diaspora?

Well, I’m still in the Diaspora *camp* so to speak. The project is making some decent progress lately to clean things up and add new features. It however isn’t ‘done’ yet and has a fair amount of time left to go before it is a more fleshed out platform.

One of the big wins with Diaspora, at least at this point is that the ‘privacy’ settings of the ‘aspects’ feature are tighter for sure than the Google+ circles implementation.

Google+ likes and features.

Circles – Circles are a list of ‘friends’. In G+ a user can have many circles to divide friends into different categories. People can be in multiple circles as well.

The function of circles is to allow a user to post content and share content to a defined audience. This is important and significant because it would allow one to post content to a circle called ‘friends’ that may not be appropriate for a group called ‘coworkers’ or ‘grandparents’.

This is possible to do in FB, but they have intentionally made it convoluted and difficult to maintain the lists and categorize your posting targets to match. G+ has the fundamental principle of separation of your audiences built right into the interface.

Also with circles you can read the categorized posts of a particular group of friends filtered out of the general ‘stream’ of all posts. This is useful when a user has broad circles of people they follow. This makes it easy to quickly view posts only from ‘family’ as a good example, in case you miss them in the torrent of other information.

The mobile app for Android is really pretty well done too. With mobile app integration I get updates about postings as they occur (though this is a bit buggy still). This gives me a more Twitter like experience but without the insane character limitations of using Twitter. As you can tell from this posting, I’m not a fan of brevity when I have something to say. I find it crippling to try and express anything of consequence in the Twitter constraints.

These are the primary reasons I like Google+ , particularly when contrasted with Facebook.

Some bugs and issues

As alluded to earlier, there are some snags with circles as they are currently implemented. Right now, one cannot have a circle of circles and this is nagging once you have, say over 100 users. I have multiple categories of ‘friends’ that I’d like to post to for common contexts and with the current implementation it requires me to select a good handful of circles to do so.

“Privacy” in circle posting content. Right now if you post to a particular circle or even a specific person, the content is fairly easy to rebroadcast by the other party. The main issue about this isn’t that the receiver couldn’t just cut/paste and repost, it’s that they could unintentionally reshare to an unintended audience.

It’s not a risk of intended malice as that is always possible, it’s more of an unintended risk of exposure of content. The receiving users may not realize the reason a sender intended on limiting the audience. Right now when posting I can restrict to a person or circle, then after the post is posted, I can return to it and disable re-sharing. However, this means the post was already unleashed first and exposed before I restricted it further.

Once a post is ‘loose’ it can’t be undone. So if I post something, let’s say a link that wasn’t what I really thought it was originally…an article headline that was catchy but turned out to be off topic or spam etc. after I finally read it. If I delete the original post, if anyone had re-shared this, it would remain shared and attributed to my account.

This same issue applies with making a post and then going back and preventing re-sharing. If the post was already shared, I cannot undo it at that point, no matter what the settings are set to. I believe the poster should ‘own’ their posting content so at any time, if they choose to revoke the posting, it should be revoked globally.

I’m not sure if this is a ‘bug’ or if there was intent here. I’m leaning towards bug as the logic involved in use cases gets to be rather vast with such a large application. I’ve submitted feedback on many aspects of these issues so we’ll see what happens as releases begin to emerge.

In my opinion, the restriction on re-sharing should be implied and the default when the scope of a posting is limited to circles or people vs. a ‘public’ tagged posting. Otherwise, what would be the point of filtering on your targets?

I’ve put a fair amount of thought into ‘privacy’ with regard to posting on any social media format and it’s been a bit vexing at times for sure.

A lot of the ‘risk’ can be readily avoided by using common sense and applying one’s brain as a pre-filter. However and I believe increasingly, consumers of social media are not in that mindset and expect the services themselves to be a good part of that filter. When considering the damage that could result it poses interesting questions for sure.

Some quickie examples where my own filter would save me, but for others, maybe not.

You hate your job, and you find a new one. You select your circle of friends, some of whom are co-workers, many are not. You post your announcement “I’m finalizing a deal right now for a new gig and I’m very happy.” One of your co-workers in your friends list re-shares your posting… with it now going to other co-workers that you are quite a bit less friendly with. This could happen completely innocently with your co-worker friend not even realizing the issue. This isn’t going to end well .

You have been out at the bar and come home half in the bag and decide to rage on about something in a way you generally would never do. Done, posted. What you posted pissed off a pile of people and upset others. You cannot revoke this post the way the system is configured now. Not only that, but as you add new people to the circles you posted this to, they will see the full history of postings you have made. You are now stuck living with the real-life hangover of your mistake.

As mentioned earlier, doing things like this are something I’ve pre-programmed myself to avoid, but I’m not so sure the newer generations or less technically savvy consumers of social media have trained themselves the same way.

Just look at the scandals of immensely public figures and their Twitter postings as obvious examples. People who totally SHOULD know better, still falling victim to their own words. The general public is far less clued.

All this considered, do take a look at Google+ and Diaspora, if for no better reason than to add competition to the pool.

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So I’ve been spamming friends far and wide to get people turned on to Diaspora so I figured I would whip up a bit of a quick intro to what it is and why I’m happy about it.

To start off, I’m not a developer on this project and I only know the bits I know from reading up and poking around at it. I’ll likely have points missing and misuse terms here, but it should give you the basic idea.

The simplest explanation is that Diaspora is a social network. One that is based on free and open source software and that is released for anyone’s use. The huge point of the project is that the data is controlled by the user. This is not a corporate interest owning your data to sell to marketing operations.

The state of the project right now is very alpha. There are missing features, bugs, everything that goes with a new project effort. Then again, we aren’t all making money from our social network time either, are we? So just jump in and get fiddling. The more users the faster the project can make progress with spotting issues and evaluating the code under load.

What makes Diaspora unique is that it is a distributed model. When you create an account on a pod your account info and data live on that pod server. All the pods are seeded together. So if you sign up on Diasp.ORG or anyone on another connected Diaspora pod will be able to find you and you will be able to share and see each other’s data.

What is really neat is if you are so technically inclined, you can stand up your own pod. If you are extremely paranoid about your data, this is the way to go as you control your own completely.

With the general public pod concept, you can back up your own content by clicking a link under account and downloading your XML data and Photos. Eventually you will be able to take your XML and Photos download/backup and restore it on another pod should you choose to move. Right now the feature isn’t released yet and is under active development.

If the pod you are registered to explodes in flames, you will lose the data there. So just be aware of that. This isn’t the one place you should rely on to store your data. Most of the public pods are pretty reliable, but it’s not where I’d store the single copy of a photo if it meant anything to me. Frankly, one shouldn’t rely on any provided service this strongly.

Right now the features are very basic, but honestly cover most of any need for the way I have my own Facebook account configured. There are status updates, direct messages, and a photo clip sharing app for sharing internet images. Mobile browser support from Android is working pretty nicely for me as well.

Linking Facebook and Twitter accounts is supported and working as well. So I can cross-post from Diaspora to Facebook and Twitter in a single post.

Another nice feature is that you arrange your contacts into aspects. Basically groups of contacts where each contact can be a member of multiple aspects if you so choose. The purpose for this is so that you can have a work aspect and then choose based on the content of your posting if people within that aspect can see it or not. Basically, you can have multiple personalities. Just use care when you make a post to choose the aspects carefully .

One example that I have are aspects for friends and for techies. Fundamentally they are all the same group as far as whether I would care what they can see, but the friends group in theory won’t see my weedy ham radio or other nerdy postings if I don’t consider them in the techies class. Truthfully most of my friends are at least as obsessed with nerddom as I am, or at least used to hearing me go on about odd things.

When posting there is a radio-button style selection for the world as well. Basically this is the within-Diaspora equivalent of a tweet. It would be visible to anyone logging into Diaspora (possibly to search engines, though I’m not totally sure there).

Also supported in Diaspora postings are some basic markup for bold print, italics, html links, and hover tag attributes. Another neat feature familiar from twitter is the use of hash-tags. If you post #information using a hash-tag, if the posting is world readable, people can search on #information and see your posting since you made a hash-tag reference to the keyword within the post. Basically just pick keywords that are topical to your posting to highlight if you wish them to be indexed this way.

I think I covered at least the basics of what is going on here. Now for some info links to get you going.

A Listing of Diaspora pods and their uptime – This will give you an idea of what pods are out there, though not all will be public and open to new signup.

Diasp.ORG – The pod that I’m personally using at the time of this writing and is currently open for joining.

JoinDiaspora – The project’s home pod and allowing accounts on an invite basis

#DiaspOrg – DiaspOrg IRC channel for the diasp.org pod specific membership on the Freenode network

#Diaspora – Diaspora project IRC channel for general Diaspora info and really for developers or pod hosts.

With diasp.org right now, there can be some bugs in the sign-up process when you go to link your Facebook and Twitter accounts. If you get the error page, just exit out and log in from the main page, your account should be created and working anyway.

Be patient, spread the word and have fun with it!

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So I got bored again and threw together another small project from assorted parts from my junk bin and Home Depot. This is a simple PTT switch for keying my amateur radio gear.

So The Egg as it were, is a DPDT switch with a double cable coming out the back of it terminating in a pair of RCA plugs. I use it to key a Dow-Key relay and the PTT of my rig which is on a multi-radio switchbox. This replaces or more accurately is an alternate to my foot switch. I find it more convenient to use the handheld switch while standing up and operating vs trying to toe a foot switch. Having a few momentary switches rigged can come in handy for a few things when playing with radio.

The parts list is simple

• 2 x 1″ PVC pipe caps
• 1 x 1″ PVC pipe nipple cut to about 1.5″
• 1 x DPDT momentary switch (you want normally open for this)
• 1 x stereo paired RCA plug cable (I bought one from RadioShack just to have a relatively soft and flexible cable)

I simply drilled out one cap to fit the switch diameter, cut a nipple to mate/join the two pipe caps, and for the bottom cap, I just used the Dremel tool to cut an opening for the RCA cable.

Tips…don’t forget to thread the cable through the parts before you solder on the switch contacts. Don’t forget to tie a couple wire ties on the cable inside the housing to prevent the cable from pulling against the switch contacts inside.

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