Tony wrote about Quechep spam. Now I see something similar is going on with facebook. I am receiving ” such and such has added you as a friend in facebook” mails, even from people with whom I have had just one fleeting email contact. One commonality in all these cases is that they all use Gmail.

I wonder if I am sending “i added you as friend” email to all in my Gmail address list. If you did receive one from me, I did not initiate it. I do not plan to use my facebok for networking, I plan to stick with LinkedIn and I will only send you LinkedIn invites.

It is scary to have any email conversation with anyone if you also ask them in the next email, ” be my friend”.

Make friends, not war! All in the name of Social Networking.

Digital dolls of rock star are not in my collectibles. I am talking about HP’s Build your own Gwen Stefani inspired doll. When you click on the link you get taken to a Flash based site that lets you pick a doll, its hair, outfit, shoes, eyes, lips …

In the end you get to a page that lets you share this doll with Yahoo MyWeb, Del.icio.us, Digg etc. You can also print it.

I wonder about the target audience here,  Kids? Teens? Tweeners? grownups? It will also be interesting to understand what social media networking will happen on sharing a digital doll.  Finding someone who has the exact choice?
If you have kids, you must know a similar flash based game on Sesamestreet,org for helping Elmo Dress up for school. My daughter loves this one. Elmos keeps asking, “What shirt should I wear? Can you find me the green pants?” This is very similar to that.
In Gwen’s case, when HP brings us to print option, that I understand.
This new campaign is part of HP’s Gwen branded digital cameras and accessories. HP says,

In our efforts to blend technology with personalization and design, we are extremely proud to partner with Gwen Stefani,” said Doug Cole, director, Alliance Marketing and Entertainment, HP. “Gwen epitomizes the seamless blending of fashion, film, music and creativity, so it made perfect sense to partner with her to launch this limited edition personalized camera for customers.”

Well after all this writing, wouldn’t it be a shame if I didn’t design a doll? Here it is

Do you Digg it?

This is it! At last.. we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi.

Here’s an article from Crave.

” Ever since Nintendo unveiled the Wii and its funky remote, gamers have been dreaming of Wiimote-controlled lightsaber battles. It’s been a long time coming, but LucasArts finally revealed its Wii lightsaber game: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

We’ve known about Force Unleashed for a few months now; the game has been scheduled to hit virtually every major platform for some time, and its absence on the Wii’s upcoming titles list didn’t go unnoticed. Now it’s finally been announced for the Wii, and a few new details have come out about the game. The Wii version of Force Unleashed will be more focused on lightsaber combat than the other consoles’ versions, and include a two-player duel mode so two Wiimote-wielding warriors can get their Jedi combat on.

Geeks flailing about with Wiimotes as if they were lightsabers. I sense a disturbance in the Force, as if a million flat-screen TVs cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

“Actually, because the number of units sold was not as high as we hoped, the loss was better than our original expectation.” - Nobuyuki Oneda, SONY Chief Financial Officer, about PS3 sales.

It’s good to lose to win…

If you type Femtocell your spell checker will be very upset. Femto, despite what your spell checker says, is 10 raised to the power of negative 15, a very small number indeed.  Femtocell means a teeny weeny Radio Base Station you can  mount in your home, just for you. Why would you need that?
Wireless phones are meant to set people free, allowing them to work from anywhere they want and have the same reachability of a tethered phone. Now as wireless phones are being substituted for fixed-line phones, more and more businesses are relying fully on using wireless for all communications. Cellular systems that are designed very well for outdoors coverage now face the problem of indoor coverage. Coverage indoors simply isn’t good.

In its Telecommunications Predictions for 2007, Deloitte talks about the “mobile’s move indoors”. They predict the rising move to wireless phones and the need for mobile operators to be fully aligned to this move.  Recently The Wall Street Journal reported that the wireless providers are moving in to take advantage of the market and the equipment like Femto cell available from vendors like Nokia.

Who are the players in femtocells?
In June of 2007 Nokia Siemens Networks (the infrastructure JV between Nokia and Siemens) announced their  3G Femto Cells . The newbie infrastructure vendor trailing behind Ericsson ad others made a good strategic move to go after Residential solutions.

Others include the Ericsson, Motorola but most importantly Google and Intel who are funding startups in this arena.

I can’t wait for the day when every house has a femtocell and for the new wave of complaints about how RF waves cause cancer and autism. (They don’t.)

This is a Flash based game(?) hosted at PublicRadio.org. Whatever the technology or digital media components, this is a real nice concept. The game really text based, asks a few details questions about where we live, how we live, shop, generate trash, recycle etc. As we keep answering the background of the locality keeps changing, new power plants, trash pileup, new oil rigs etc. It also keeps saying how many earths are needed to support our living.

I like this game from the message it tries to convey and I strongly urge you to play.

I still don’t get it why they ask us to select an avatar, with new hairstyles, glasses, facial expression and dresses before we start answering the questions. If this were a game done in SecondLife it sure would have the “real” consequences and would be a fun one to play. But for a subject like sustainability, we need all the jazz it takes to create awareness.

I listened to a podcast at Telephony Online on the advent of Dual-line phones. Just like your home phone that comes with Line1 and Line2, certain mobile phones are going to support Dual (actually multiple) lines per handset.

This reminds me of my conversations with mobile phone users in India when I visited the country past June. With 6 million new additions per month, most people who work in the cities have phones. Most importantly, most use GSM phones (as opposed to Qualcomm’s CDMA) phones that support a SIM card.  Your identity, (trivially, your number) is tied to your SIM card. So by changing your SIM card you will have a completely new number.

People who use their business provided phone or those who use their personal phones for business purposes, usually carry more than one SIM cards. They swap the SIM cards by the end of the day, so that “work” won’t call them and yet they can use the phone.

Dual-line tries to serve that purpose but without swapping SIM cards. Would it catch on?

Here is the link to the podcast (MP3).

Close on the heels of the cover story on Google by The Economist, Financial Times reports  what Google is planning to do in the coming days on addressing the privacy issues.

Going further on the offensive, Mr Fleischer on Friday will say he believes existing internet privacy rules are out of date. The OECD’s guidelines on privacy and personal data, for example, were set up in 1980, well before the invention of the internet, and even the European Commission directive on privacy dates back to 1995, when the internet was still in its infancy.

“Privacy laws have not kept up with the reality of the internet and technology, where we have vast amounts of information and every time a credit card is used online, the data on it can move across six or seven countries in a matter of minutes,” Mr Fleischer told the Financial Times ahead of his speech.

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, is expected to add his voice to the campaign over the next few weeks.

Like our credit scores (which we do not own or control) and the steps we need to take to ensure that our score as seen by ChoicePoint  is correct, will it become an individual’s responsibility to monitor?  Will there be a market for services that will help us identify privacy encroachments and expunge them? ” Pay $8 a month and we will keep a lid on  Internet records about you.”

Have you been deleting huge powerpoints and scouring your mp3’s trying to free up disk space? Are you wondering where your 80 gigs of hard drive space went in the last year? Wouldn’t it be great if you could learn who, at a glance, are the culprits hogging your file system? I came across a great solution that produces a visual depiction of your hard drive after a quick scan of the file system. It helps you understand where you can free up disk space by illustrating visually (color coded by file type) which are the largest files on your drive. It also helps you understand proportionally what you have on your disk drive. I was doubly pleased to find versions available for both Windows, Sequoiaview treemap, and Mac, Disk Inventory X. I tried both of these out and they worked great. After more investigation, it turns out that several options are out there… a brief discussion can be found on this blog. Happy cleaning.

(This is a post that’s been banging around in my head for some time. Tony’s well-titled post about his distaste for Quechup abusing access he gave to his online address book, served as inspiration to sit down and compose. As for Tony’s warning, I did not respond to the Quechup invitation, primarily because I am put off when I receive an email from a website I did not give my address for the reasons I will state below.)

I feel that websites hurt us all by training people to provide friends’ email addresses to third parties (e.g. websites). I consider the “email this to a friend” forms on websites the online equivalent of a stranger on the street asking me for a friend’s email address. Sure, the site will email the article to the friend, but I have no idea what will be done with my friend’s email address after that. Options include: nothing, send spam, sell it to a spammer, store it on a server to be hacked into at some point in the future, etc.

Even more dangerous are the “friend finder” tools offered by social web services (e.g. Facebook) that have people provide their authentication credentials for online address books and that identify their friends by email address. By allowing authentication through third-party servers, the major social mapping services (AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo!) facilitate third-party access to not only contacts’ email addresses, but also members’ authentication credentials (anyone who logged into Quechup: you may want to change your Gmail password).

In consideration of spam’s tremendous drain on productivity, I wish websites were designed to encourage better habits – social norms less prone to abuse by potential spammers. What’s so difficult about providing visitors with a link they can share with others through their own email client, authenticated channels (IM and other social networking tools), or their own website? Word-of-mouth will always be the most effective marketing. Not only because of the credibility lent by the mouth’s reputation, but also because sales often takes repeated pitches. I may wait to try a service until I’ve heard about several friends using it. After spamming invitees, sites like Friendster now provide the invitee the option of instructing the service to never email them again. Well, if invitees select that option upon the first invite, there goes a shot at repeated sales pitches!

Responding to my rhetorical question above, I realize that many people are not familiar with the technical details on how the internet works – including seemingly basic tasks like copy and pasting links into emails. I also understand the demand to recognize people you know using the same services as you. Unfortunately, the common solution to this second problem often includes handing over the contact information for everyone the person knows. I want to identify people I know using the service, but I don’t want to give websites access to the contact information of everyone I know. Fortunately, the social graph is portable and smart services allow their members to take their social mappings with them without exposing their authentication credentials or others’ contact information.

I do not think an open social graph is the answer – I will only map my social network when I can retain access control to the social mappings.

I admire user experience designers that take a broader view of the choices they make: thinking not just about the experience of using the product or service itself, but also how the offering fits into people’s lives and will affect society. Design in a way that enforces habits consistent with the social contract of respecting privacy and discourages habits leaving people susceptible to unintentionally jeopardizing the privacy of others for whom they care.

p.s. I’ve heard an argument that by forwarding an email address to Gmail, you may be violating a social contract not to share their personal conversations with The Google. (Again the whole “fear The Google” thing.)