Links
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I can’t decide. It’s Any.do for now, as of February 25, 2013. Wunderlist has great native apps on most platforms, both mobile and PC, but Any.do is the best mobile solution I’ve found, and that’s where I really need a task manager. ↩
Google+ lead asks for advice from Google Reader fans
Google+ lead asks for advice from Google Reader fans
Google+ architect Yontan Zunger meant well, but Google+ will never be sufficient as a reader. Brands maintain a curated presence there for audience outreach and building purposes, not to provide readers with a convenient way to determine what content in that brand’s firehose of updates readers may wish to read further.
Note: I cross-posted this from a comment I wrote on Google+.
Porn troll Prenda Law angers judge with shady behavior
Porn troll Prenda Law angers judge with shady behavior
Earlier this week I mentioned that the EFF was going to represent a couple of anti-trolling websites in a case brought by porno copyright troll Prenda Law.
The Ars Technica article by Megan Geuss is well-written and really conveys the absurdity of the situation in which Prenda has put itself. I urge you to click the link in this post’s title to go give her piece a full read.
Also, if you’re interested in keeping up with the latest in potential troll-stomping, consider keeping an eye on the Ars series "Who’s behind Prenda Law?". They always do great work at Ars and this series is no exception.
Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly
Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly
From the Feedly blog:
We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.
Feedly is my top contender for a Reader replacement right now: multi-platform, ready to clone my Reader feeds, and prepared to essentially take over much of Reader’s core subscribe-and-sync functionality when Google pulls the plug.
Also, I can’t help but assume that they’re calling it Normandy because there are tens of thousands of Google Reader users suddenly storming their shores.
Dear Wall Street Journal: Why is Facebook's hashtag implementation news?
Dear Wall Street Journal: Why is Facebook’s hashtag implementation news?
I love that this is “news” at the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps the only news-worthy aspect of this story is that it’s one of those rare instances where Facebook is the one keeping up with the Joneses, instead of the other way around.
When will this vaunted hashtag implementation be completed? No one knows, despite WSJ's having talked to some of those ubiquitous and ever-informative “people familiar with the matter.”
What I think is really wonderful about this non-story is that it took not one but two people at WSJ to produce it, Evelyn M. Rusli and Shira Ovide. I don’t pretend to know the usual caliber of those journalists’ work, but I hope, for their sake, that the topic of this blurb is uncharacteristically dull.
Whitson Gordon finally figured out Evernote
Whitson Gordon finally figured out Evernote
I’m not being snarky: he writes at Lifehacker about how he never “got” Evernote, until recently. It’s a great article and I can say I’ve made at least some use of every technique Gordon discusses. The most important? Use Evernote all the time, for everything, and it will become a powerful part of your workflow.
Powering Down Google Reader
I don’t even know what to say about this. Reader is an integral part of my workflow and I need to figure something else out. If you have any alternatives to suggest, please let me know.
The Evening Edition Podcast
Evening Edition is a wonderful way to catch up on news that doesn’t include a Kardashian or an Apple rumor. Now, they offer a five-minute daily podcast featuring the stories of the day. I tried reading Evening Edition via their email newsletter, RSS, and the website itself, but I miss a day or two each week. I have found the podcast much easier to fit into a hectic schedule. I highly recommend it.
EFF will represent targets of copyright troll Prenda Law
EFF will represent targets of copyright troll Prenda Law
Copyright trolls sue lots of people to extract settlements from those who can’t afford to litigate in the face of potentially massive statutory damages. Their claims are often facially lacking in merit and instead leverage intimidation and poorly-constructed federal copyright damages provisions to bankrupt people for profit.
I’m impressed by Wordpress’ parent company, Automattic, who refused to respond to the troll’s fishing expedition. And it’s good to see EFF lend a hand here in the form of representation, but eventually Congress needs to step in and fix the statutory damages provisions that incentivize copyright trolls to this vile abuse of our legal system in the first place.
For some great background and reporting on trolls and those who fight them, read this Ars Technica piece by Timothy B. Lee.
Harvard snooped on faculty email
Harvard snooped on faculty email
If you’re composing an email you don’t want someone to see, consider picking up the phone instead. Your assumptions about the privacy of email are inaccurate.
How to Export Your Last.fm Listening History on a Mac
My goal was simple: I wanted to export all of the tracks I’ve listened and stored in my Last.fm account. I don’t have any real experience working with APIs, but thanks to Jeroen Baert’s post, which I found via this StackExchange thread, I found a handy Python script that even a newb can run.
The script was originally written for use in moving your Last.fm data to Libre.fm, but it works just as well as a standalone backup.
I saved lastexport.py to my home folder (the one with your Mac username) and opened up a Terminal window. Then, I just pasted the following command into the Terminal prompt and pressed Enter:
python lastexport.py -u last.fm_user_name
Make sure you replace last.fm_user_name with your own Last.fm user name. The script will store the results in a text file called exported_tracks.txt, located in your Home folder or whatever other folder you saved the script in. The data in the text file is a little messy, but it’s all there.
If you know how to make the data prettier, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.
ECPA amendment would require warrant even for email older than 6 months
ECPA amendment would require warrant even for email older than 6 months
Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Ted Poe (R-Texas), and Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) are pushing an amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that would require a warrant for authorities to obtain any email, instead of allowing free access to messages older than six months.
I wrote in January about Google’s decision to require a warrant even where the law does not, so the ECPA’s shortcomings in the digital age (the law is more than twenty years old) are sometimes mitigated by responsible corporate policies.
But a legitimate amendment like Lofgren’s would apply Google’s common sense approach to 4th Amendment rights to all such service providers. There’s simply no excuse not to get this done.
How to Roll Your Own Multireddit
This is probably so awesome to me because only recently have I dusted off my Reddit account and started using the internet’s greatest link-sharing site in earnest.
Reddit is divided into “subreddits.” These are topic-based, like /r/Gaming and /r/Tumblr. It allows the growth of communities based on shared interests or disinterests.
Now all of that I knew, and you probably did, too. But what I recently found out is that you can append multiple subreddits to a URL to open them in a cocktail of sorts. So, if you want to view a mashup of Reddit entries about Philadelphia, technology, and burritos, just go to /r/philadelphia+technology+burritos.
The possibilities are endless, so use /r/Multireddit to browse what your fellow redditors have posted.
Twitter kills TweetDeck, announces it on Posterous, which they're also killing
Twitter kills TweetDeck, announces it on Posterous, which they’re also killing
I admit, squeezing the entire post into the title is lazy, but at least it’s informative. I’ll link to Twitter’s death notice for Posterous and call it a post.
Twitter kills my favorite Twitter app for Android
Twitter kills my favorite Twitter app for Android
In August, Twitter turned its back on the sort of independent developers who built their community for them. Now, my favorite Twitter app for Android, Falcon Pro, has hit Twitter’s artificial user limit.
They have other apps, (like an incredible widget that is also a fully-functional Twitter client), but they can’t accept any more Falcon Pro users.
Falcon Pro’s left- and right-drawer layout, with an elegant, clutter-free but feature-packed design, won me over instantly. It came out just as I had given up on Carbon for Twitter, a beautiful app nearly dismissed as vaporware as it faced numerous release setbacks.
Carbon finally came out, and it is very pretty, but Falcon Pro fits my personal Twitter use case best, so Carbon is a close second. You know what isn’t even in the top five? Twitter’s official Android client.
Over 3,000 people have signed a petition to raise Falcon Pro’s limit as of Saturday night, but that’s at Twitter’s absolute discretion, and it would set a bad precedent, so I’m not holding my breath.
But if you tried out Falcon Pro and didn’t like it, you can revoke the app’s access to your Twitter account, thereby freeing up a token for a new user. Redditor classic_schmosby explains in this comment.
Twitter: You can’t build and maintain a thriving ecosystem with token limits and patronizing blog posts about “building user value.” You will never offer a sufficient variety of apps to please all use cases. Your developer community fosters a massive user base that may not otherwise come to or stay with Twitter, pumping data into your system for you to monetize. Developers get and keep users for you by offering designs, features, and improvements that you cannot provide. Don’t stifle that, celebrate it.
Facebook is buying your loyalty card history
Facebook is buying your loyalty card history
Cotton Delo of Ad Age:
The targeting would hypothetically enable Coca-Cola to target to teenagers who’ve bought soda in the last month, or Pampers to show ads to North Carolina residents who’ve recently bought baby products, since Facebook’s own array of demographic and interest-based targeting options can be added to further refine audience segments. But adoption will be contingent on acceptance by corporate legal departments wary of becoming embroiled in a consumer privacy scare.
It’s not something I would rush into if I was one of those “corporate legal departments.” It’s not that I have some conspiracy theory about Facebook, or those data banks. I don’t. We give data to those data banks willingly when we use those discount cards. Shame on us for not reading the fine print.
And Facebook? They’re the same: the fact that nothing private is guaranteed to stay that way on the internet is common knowledge these days, and those who don’t know should know.
What would worry me as in-house counsel is what hackers will find when they inevitably get their hands on some of this data. In other words, Facebook and data banks are the devils we know. I would keep clients out of this plan because of the devils we don’t know.
Evernote CEO hints at future task management integration
Evernote CEO hints at future task management integration
Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, talking to Lifehacker:
What’s your favorite to-do list manager?
You know, I don’t actually have one. I use Evernote, which isn’t particularly great for to-dos yet. Yet.
Despite having tried every task management app I can find, and settling on Wunderlist1Any.do for now, I’m very excited about an integrated Evernote task management solution.
Zombie Law Schools
Gerard Magliocca of Concurring Opinions introduces a fresh take on the legal education topic.
CBS "Streisanding" itself among courts with CNET debacle
CBS “Streisanding” itself among courts with CNET debacle
CBS’s strong-arming of CNET on this front has the exact opposite of the intended effect: now that it is clear how much control CBS has and is willing to exert over CNET content, any reasonable court must consider the possibility that the corporation is as deliberate about what CNET is allowed to do as they are being about what CNET is not allowed to do. Stock manipulation is the one I’m really thinking about here, but perhaps there are others.
It’s poor management, poor lawyering, and broken logic.