My solution to date… Selective Tweets grabs tweets that include a special #fb hashtag and reposts to Facebook. It’s simple to use, works great and has been a huge timesaver for me. But Google+ doesn’t work with Selective Tweets so I’ve been looking for a universal solution. (Selective Tweets is a Facebook specific app and was last updated in Nov 2010, well before Google+.)

My wish list is for Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn. I’m guessing the circles aspect of Google+ will be a wrinkle since I wouldn’t want to spam my Google+ professional friends with a personal post.

On the hunt…  stay tuned!

Why do I like RockMelt?  I like the way it’s hardwired for social.  You don’t have to keep Facebook open (in a tab, or at all) to stay connected to all your friends.  Facebook is always on!  Same with Twitter — the tweets keep rolling in.  And sharing to Facebook or Twitter is insanely easy (RockMelt even creates the short url).  Just click the “share” button next to the url, choose your destination (e.g. to your Facebook wall or to Twitter), add any desired commentary, and ba da bing ba da boom you’re sharing.  Easy sharing isn’t new, but often required help from a site or software.  With RockMelt, easy sharing is always on everywhere you go.

A few years back none of this would have mattered to me.  I was Tweeting and Facebooking sure, but…  it wasn’t a vital part of my day-to-day.  But since then I’ve found both services more important.  Moreover, I recently moved from San Francisco to NYC, and Facebook has become my lifeline to my Bay Area friends.  With Rockmelt I can be reading the NY Times or Wired and “chime” my friends from all over can be ringing my bell.  Tweets roll in through my task bar.  It’s all baked into my browser.

RockMelt is built using Chromium, which is the open-source project behind Google Chrome.  So it has the same clean look as Chrome, with a nice social framework as icing.  It loads fast like Chrome.  Overall it’s sparse and uncluttered — just you, your browswer and all your facebook friends.

I have some quibbles — I don’t like the way the Google search form defaults to providing results in a stripped down edge tab (I prefer Google’s fully formatted results) but there’s a link to open the results in a full tab…  and my favorite toolbars don’t run on RockMelt (yet)…  but RockMelt is still new.  Overall thumbs up.

If you like to stay connected while online, check out RockMelt!

Rebooting the phone helps, but it’s inconvenient and sometimes not an option.  I’m not saying I don’t like my iPhone anymore, I do.  When it works it rocks!  But what had exuded elegance and performance now feels clumsy and occasionally verges on demented.  What happened?!

The answer is iVista, aka iOS 4, the latest iPhone OS that Apple more-or-less requires you to install through iTunes.  This isn’t the first major upgrade to the OS, there have been several.  But iVista hit my phone like a load of bricks.  Bam–my iPhone 3G groaned under the load.

It’s fair to say that each major version of the iOS is tuned for the latest & greatest iPhone hardware platform.  My 3G is now two years and two hardware versions behind.  Left alone, running the original OS (including minor revisions) my iPhone would still be supercharged.  Missing the latest features, for sure, but as energetic as the day it arrived.

It turns out it is possible to downgrade from iOS 4, but the process is extremely technical and not for the weak of heart.  I’m sure it’s not Apple sanctioned.  That said, here’s how to do it.

Having invested time organizing all my apps into folders (an iOS 4 feature I like), I’m not sure I’m going to ditch iOS 4 just yet… but there have been times I’ve been ready to take a hammer to my little friend so that day may come soon.

Or, I may fall prey to Apple’s sinister ways.  With my iPhone now poisoned with iVista, I’m starting to jones for a gleaming treasure; beautiful to behold and snappy in performance.  An iPhone 4!  (Steve Jobs:  It’s all going according to my plans.  Moi-haha!)

Overall it’s clear that you can do all kinds of things with Open Graph, including those bordering on the creepy. I’m not a fan of creepy so staying clear of spooky games that would freak out my visitors.  (Surprise!  Betcha you didn’t know I knew that about you!)

But, as long as publishers make it opt-in and transparent, it has the potential for great stuff.  It makes for an efficient use of the social graph–it makes sharing easy and sharing drives traffic.  In fact, in just one month on my site Facebook went from rank #4 to #1 in referring sites, beating out Google.  Facebook has maintained the #1 position since.  Google has always been my #1 traffic source (and that traffic isn’t going down) so this is quite interesting.

The downside is that there are latency issues involved in Open Graph, since a tagged page can’t fully load until Facebook responds.  Nothing new here — every external tag has the potential for latency.  I already have multiple third party javascript tags on every page (for Google Analytics and Google Checkout) but haven’t found them to be a problem.  However, on a “photo roll” page on my site there might be a dozen or more photos, and each photo has its own Like button.  So, while the latency for each button load is small, a dozen buttons (or more!) on a single page add up.  My photo roll pages load but don’t scroll until all the buttons are loaded.  That’s not a great user experience(!)

So, I plan to keep testing the Like buttons, but new sections will only have Like buttons on individual photo pages (not the roll).  This should make latency a non-issue.  However, it will also hide the buttons from most users, since my visitors tend to browse photos on the photo roll pages, and less often view the detail (photo enlargement) pages.  I thought it was cool to scan a photo roll and instantly see all the “liked” photos…  now you’ll have to view a photo’s detail page to see if that photo is liked.  In a perfect world without latency, I’d continue with multiple buttons on the photo roll (fun and useful) but I can’t have pages acting wonky.

Once I see how this use of the Like buttons compares with my previous implementation, I’ll standardize on one approach.  More later!

I was watching the game and paused my TiVo in overtime to run a short errand that couldn’t wait.  I’d catch the end when I got back…

As I was returning, a car with two glum looking guys–both in orange jerseys–turned the corner.  They were heading up Clayton, leaving the Haight.  This could only mean one thing — the Orange (The Netherlands) had lost, and the exodus (losers) from the Haight Street bars had begun.

Was my theory correct and the Dutch the sad losers?  I pulled out my phone and checked Twitter.  Goal Spain! tweeted the NYTimes and several others.

I unpaused TiVo when I got back but the suspense was over.  Orange shirts were leaving the Haight.  Game over!

What’s going on Tom?  I forget how you got my e-mail but it was about ten years ago.  That was fine.  I requested to unsubscribe since I was happy just listening to your tunes — no need for the fan mail.  That lasted a bit, and then the e-mails resumed.  I unsubscribed again.  And that worked…  but only for a few years.  You’d be back!   The last time was in 2006; I saved a copy of that unsubscribe since I wanted to see how long you’d hold off.  Fresh Petty-mail arrived on Saturday.  Four years, that’s restraint!

The e-mails have all been sent to an account that I haven’t used in a decade but still monitor.  The only one who uses it is Tom.  I’d say he has a good memory but actually it’s the opposite.  OK, end of rant. 

I was on board with the original TiVo and subsequent models since then.  TiVo always impressed me with their thoughtful UI, and programming the unit from my laptop made it easy to search for programs and schedule things to record. I’m a light TV viewer but find TiVo makes TV fun–all my favorite stuff is on!  I guess I came to take it all for granted…  So, when I upgraded my cable to HD, my old TiVo became obsolete since it couldn’t record HD.  I decided to give the Comcast HD DVR a spin instead.  How bad could it be, right?  Big mistake.

The Comcast box’s dorky interface (and bizarre cluttered remote) was a miserable experience.  Instead of controlling the DVR from a computer (easy and logical) the Comcast DVR made me navigate grids of on-screen letters to slowly peck out instructions via the remote.  It was worse than DOS.  Well, maybe not but it sure seemed it.

I decided I had to either cancel Comcast or fix the box.  So I returned the DVR to Comcast and bought a TiVo HD Premiere instead.  It records full HD at 1080p and has room for 45 HD hours.  More importantly, most of my interactions with TiVo are via the internet, using a full keyboard and whizzy web pages.  Sweet.  Finally, I know TiVo will work hard for me, and find nuggets based on stuff I like.  The TiVo box gets to know you and lives to serve; the Comcast box was content to be unhelpful and unused.

Oh, and I get the groovy TiVo remote back.  Yay!  And the great TiVo interface.  And Netflix streaming.  And You Tube clips.  All my favorite stuff is back on!

• 2010.04.24 / Steady at Paradise Lounge
• 2010.04.28 / Qoöl Open Haus

I’m using Facebook’s “like” buttons since they are potentially fun and useful to site visitors as well as being easy to implement from a webmaster perspective.  The “like” button provides an easy way for users to share photos on my site with their Facebook friends, without having to cut and paste URL’s into Facebook posts.  While a user’s initial “like” requires agreement to share data between Facebook and my site, after that the experience is seamless.

I choose these sections since the photos are for events with an existing Facebook fan network.  The fan page exists, and has over 600 active followers.  People likely to be interested in the photos are likely to be on Facebook.  A post on the fan page is an excellent way to prime the pump and let people know that a new photo set has been posted.

• Facebook:  The-Qool-Happy-Hour Page

While less than 10% of the photos were “liked”, each “like” created a new wave of visits from that person’s network of friends.  I benchmarked traffic of this event to similar events from Qoöl, and found both visits and page views to be double any recent event.  The magnitude of the increase suggests a new dynamic at play.  In this case, the only new component was integration with Facebook’s Open Graph.  In fact, after just two days of activity, Facebook jumped from 8th place to 2nd as a referring site–just behind Google.  Photos “liked” by influential visitors (those with the largest network of friends) were, not surprisingly, top ranked pages in terms of views.

From an integration standpoint, Open Graph lived up to its claim of simplicity.  Writing the Lua algorithms to generate all the tags based on my Lightroom database was easy — I was already referencing the needed database fields for existing tags so could copy and tweak.  And, most bloggers can use one of many available plug-ins to drag and drop “like” buttons onto pages or templates; less flexible but fine for most needs.  A webmaster of a small site could easily hand code tags on select pages, since there’s not much to it.  In fact, the taxonomy currently in place (Object types) is downright skimpy; I would have preferred “Photograph” but had to settle for “Website” when classifying photos on my site.  This taxonomy will likely become more robust over time…

As admin I can see the names of Facebook members who have “liked” any given page.  There are gray areas and not everyone is equally comfortable with sharing, so I’m participating in the privacy debate while testing the moving parts.

I’ll include Facebook “like” buttons on upcoming events I cover for the Qoöl Happy Hour to see if I see similar increases in traffic.  And, I’ll be talking to users to better understand their feelings about Open Graph.  Did visitors notice the “like” buttons, and if so what was their reaction to them?  Did they use them?  Do they find the whole idea creepy?

One negative finding:  the “like” buttons can at times significantly slow down final page load.  Buttons often appear up to a second after the rest of the page has loaded; however, their slow load doesn’t overly get in the way (at least on my site), as the page is fully viewable and functional prior to the buttons loading. Many of my pages have over a dozen+ thumbnails and thus as many unique “like” buttons on a page.  These pages naturally have a longer button delay versus a photo detail page, with a single photo and button call.  I’m going to keep an eye on page load time since I don’t want Facebook to ruin my user’s experience.

It’s early in my test and I’m following the privacy debate related to Open Graph.  I believe that used in a way that respects a user’s privacy and provides a benefit, Open Graph can be a positive thing.  I’m intrigued!

It’s also crazy scary.  Some teenagers may hate it in ten years, when a choice “like” or other share comes back to haunt them.  Sometimes digital data just won’t die.  And this has the potential to put all kinds of stuff all over the place.

Privacy alarm bells go off but oh the wonders that blinked on with the flip of a switch!  Pandora just became way more interesting and fun–with no work on my part.  Connections were simply made.  The idea of creating a new circle of friends on every site and application is nuts.  This makes way more sense.

The ability to share so many different types of things is awesome despite the data privacy issues. The Open Graph protocol page has lots of crunchy nuggets worth checking out.

Ultimately this can work if users are in control.  Automatic opt-ins are expedient but not the winning strategy (Google Buzz); a clearly understood opt-in is the way to go.  I liked how Pandora handled it, it was very clear what I was agreeing to (and I’m glad I did).

As a user I’m excited!   It’s fun and it’s useful.  And scary.

A practical use of depth of field is for landscapes. For instance, you might want to extend focus from a rock in the foreground back to the horizon.  Presuming you desire a certain focal length (70mm) and focus distance (18ft to the rock), your only variable is aperture.  What aperture should be used to yield this result?  Since a tiny aperture requires longer exposures and can yield less crisp images versus a larger aperture, you don’t want to stop down more than is required(!)

The equations to figure all this stuff are complicated and something you don’t want to do on a calculator.  Did I mention that every camera has its own special constant, based on the size and resolution of the sensor or film in the camera?  It’s called the circle of confusion (CoC).  Does your head hurt yet?

Fortunately, there’s an app for that.  Hand held computers such as the iPhone allow you to completely understand DOF for any shot, simply by wheeling in key variables including your camera/CoC pair (e.g. Canon 5D/0.03mm).  The quality of apps vary; I’ve tried a half dozen on the iPhone and recommend DoF ($2 from the App Store). Once you’ve selected your camera (one time, for  CoC), just dial in focal length and aperture along with your focus distance and it calculates eight key parameters on the fly:  DoF total, DoF in front, DoF behind, CoC, Hyperfocal, DoF far-limit, DoF near limit, and focus distance.

So where does the laser come in?  The laser provides precise distance measurements, especially on distances beyond 10 yards when it becomes difficult to precisely “eyeball” a distance.  Is a foreground subject 35 meters or 45 meters away?  I used to guess and often guessed wrong.  By adding a small and modestly priced laser rangefinder to my field kit, I can id key distances with confidence.  Golfers and hunters both use rangefinders, and most sporting goods stores sell them.  I purchased one at the low end (a Bushnell for $150) and it’s been all I need.

Being able to understand your hyperfocal and other DoF parameters for any given combination of variables is sweet and makes what used to be hard, easy.