Networking the social

So I'm gearing up for a big post (at least it feels like it) on social networking in relation to the ever-looming Horizon report. But November 1st brought something new to the fore of these online tools. Google (again with the Google) launched a new service called OpenSocial. This is essentially a tool to help people write 3rd-party applications for social networking sites. These applications are one of the things that allow people to customize their spaces in MySpace or Facebook. You can see some examples of these tools for Facebook here.

Facebook has devised a particularly ingenious method for coaxing people to try these tools as your News Feed will report on which applications friends have recently added. It worked with me today when I was thinking about this and saw that a friend from high school had added Super Wall. I figured, "Hey, I'll try it out." In any case, what News Feed produces is a viral flocking toward applications.

While these tools are essentially small plug ins, but their viral popularity makes them big business (there are 7000+ for Facebook as of today). They can drive ad dollars and, in some instances, developers charge for the use of the software. What has been difficult thus far is that programmers who develop an application for one social networking site will--logically--want to allow those who aren't cool enough to know that orkut, friendster, and LinkedIn are so 2004 to use their application. Most of these different sites, however, have used different and proprietary APIs (application programming interface). This radically increased the workload for these programmers. And this in turn lowers the number of viable alternative social networking sites since less and less people are making new and interesting applications for these less popular sites.

What Google has done is proposed a new API that will be compatible across social networking sites. This means less work for the programmers. Oh, and more traffic for Google. An amazing number of the social-networking-erati have signed on for the project, including MySpace. The exception is Facebook. There are of course reactions (some negative and some positive) to the Goog's latest move.

My thoughts? I think Facebook is right on this count, from a business perspective. With Microsoft's recent investment in Facebook, the company could be realistically valued at $15 billion. That's about 10x the value of YouTube. It makes sense because while everyone loves a viral video, what people like even more is when that viral video is brought directly to you via your friends (and not through an email forward) but through the News Feed feature.

Getting Photos into Google Earth

I was playing around very quickly yesterday with my Picasa Web albums and noticed a new feature. But wait, let's back up. Picasa is Google's photo editing software. In the grand Google tradition, it was the product of a company that Google bought out a few years ago. I've been using Picasa for over two years and I've found it's a very nice tool for keeping all of my photos and movies organized on the computer. When you have children, you quickly realize that you need a tool for organizing almost as much as you need one for editing.

The editing tools in Picasa are nothing special. Basic color fixing, basic cropping, some special effects. Red eye removal. I've found, however, that they are more often than not all that I need for touching things up. The biggest bonus, in my opinion, is that Picasa saves a copy of all the changes I make to a photo and makes it possible for me to always return to the original image if I want to. That way my experimenting with the image doesn't ruin it permanently. Of course, there are other tools out there that do this: Microsoft has Office Picture Manager, Adobe has Photoshop Elements, and I could go on. But an advantage of Picasa is that it is free. And that's something we like in both the Croxall household and in ECIT. (It is also a very good tool for doing progressive backups of your photos, which helps you keep second copies off your hard drive and get secondary backups off site to your parents in Utah.)

Another thing that I really love about Picasa is how it integrates with Gmail. You can bundle photos to send out to people straight from the photo software. Again, you can do that with many other programs, but what was essential for me was that Picasa automatically resized the photos for me when I mailed them out. Since we have an 8 MP Canon camera and we didn't have broadband at home until about six months ago, this meant that sending photos could be a real pain. Picasa took care of all that for us. This isn't so much of a problem on our end anymore, but it is still nice to use the software to prevent our sending out those massive, 8x bigger than your screen photos.

Okay, so we've covered Picasa as it functions on your computer. About two years ago, Google also created a web presence for Picasa that allows you to host photos online and share them with others. Of course, there are a lot of other services that allow you to do this as well: Kodak Gallery, Photobucket, and, of course, Flickr. These tools are great for sharing photos with others (because--at least with Flickr and Picasa--you get an RSS feed of people's photos and can then read them in your feed reader of choice [see previous blog post]). And of course, they allow you to tag your photos, use each photo's individual URL for hosting it in a blog or some such thing, and more.

Another new thing that at least Flickr and Picasa have included is the ability to geotag your photos. What this means is that you can identify where a particular photo album was taken and then drag and drop those photos onto a map to give an even more precise idea. You can see how this works in Flickr (photos geotagged to "Amsterdam, Noord Holland") and in Picasa (an example of photos mapped along the Strip in Vegas). I'm not as familiar with Flickr as I am with Google's tools, but I have to say that I like the latter a little better because it gives better outlines of buildings.

So this brings us to last point (which is really where I started). If you are looking at a Picasa web album that has been geotagged (like this one of photos I took during the Dragon Con parade), then you also get the option (in the right hand corner) to view the photos within Google Earth. When you click on this, you can either run it immediately in Google Earth or download the kml file. And suddenly you have your photos plugged into Google Earth for you. Magic!

Now of course, you can insert photos directly into Google Earth without too much trouble. But if you are already using Picasa Web, this will save you some time. Even if you aren't using it, however, this might be an easier way for people to get photos into Google Earth than having to deal with the coding that is otherwise required.

Mapping My Work

Last week I had the chance to sit down for several hours with the library's new GIS librarian, Michael Page, to learn the inner secrets of Google Earth. This was all related to a talk I was giving for the Emory Psychoanalytic Studies Program on the last chapter of my dissertation. To sum up very briefly, I did a reading of William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition that shows how the novel depicts both trauma and technology in terms of speed. I wanted to make an argument about how fast communication technology works to enable information to move from one character to another, but in order to do so I needed to know how far the characters traveled within the environs of London, specifically Camden Town. (On my pitiful stipend, I couldn't afford the research trip to London.) I at first turned to Google Maps, but then tried Google Earth to get a better idea of what the area looked like. I wrote the argument into my chapter and thought I was done.

When the talk suddenly loomed on my horizon, I wondered if I could bring the pictures of Camden Town in with me to help make the argument more convincing. People wouldn't have to take my word for how little time elapses in the particular passage I was concerned with, but could see it. One thing led to another and spilled over from some other research I'd done in connection with New York City (where, again, I've never been) for the chapter, and I decided to map four different parts of the novel: Camden Town, Tokyo, and New York on 9/11 and on 9/19/01. Michael helped me learn how to use paths, fly throughs, and other tools to dress up my maps. You can see the results here. Just download the .kmz files and open them in your own Google Earth application.

I was very pleased with the results of the talk. At first I thought the technology would help to keep people's attention from what I was saying. ("Ooh, pretty 3D renderings!") In actuality, I think that it helped me to make my arguments effectively and to also help those who were unfamiliar with the novel and its plot have a better, more concrete, if you will, sense of what happened in the novels. I was no longer simply reading a paper at people; instead they were watching the areas of the novel come to life. A prime example of show, not tell. Finally, I think interacting with the computer forced me to go off script and to talk more like a human. This is always a plus when doing a presentation like this. For this reason, I don't think I would ever turn these presentations into movies, although Google Earth Pro offers that functionality. It seems to me that it was important for the audience to see me interacting with the software--even changing the settings--so they got a sense of the tactility, for lack of a better word, of the environment I was using. And hopefully it gave them a sense that this was something they could do themselves.

I'm really interested in continuing to think how our reading of novels would differ if we use mapping techniques like this. I'm going to lay the blame squarely on Franco Moretti's shoulders.