As usual, I have a long story about the subject, but the condensed version is that I have been given a challenge, a mandate to share more of my work, just for the sake of doing so. I’m exploring my creativity again, for its own sake, ars gratia artis, and just putting it out there. Hence, I posted a few poems.
Category: Field Notes
Notes from the field. Perspective thoughts on things that I watch and read and from working in tech.
It can not be this difficult to paginate a document in sections without Word. It just can’t.
AOL was not the Internet. In the early days, the late 80’s and early 90’s, they sold it to you as such, but it wasn’t. You could get access to Usenet, and eventually to the larger Internet, but that’s another story. Still, using the online service could be a fun experience and perhaps no part of the service outside of the iconic “You’ve Got Mail” sound was more popular than IM. Before there were Twitter followers and Facebook “friends,” if you were on AOL, you had your buddy list. Unless you used IRC or ICQ, bulletin boards, or some type of instant chat via a Unix system, chances are, you used AOL. If you weren’t a techie, you almost certainly used AOL.
Still, the presence of services like IRC or ICQ became a problem for AOL. Before then, if you were an AOL user, you paid for that privilege. AOL IM was part of AOL’s “walled garden,” its own content and subservices inside of the service. IRC and ICQ allowed users to chat with anybody on the Internet. Eventually, the noise from both AOL users and non-users to bridge to the Internet became too loud to ignore and in 1997, AOL opened up its IM service in the form of AOL Instant Messenger, or, AIM.
Now, people on the Internet could chat with paying AOL customers. Despite becoming the most popular chat service on the web over its rivals Yahoo!’s Pager (Messenger) and eventually, Microsoft, this represented a subtle shift for AOL, as they were essentially hosting non-paying users in their service (AOL would also buy ICQ in 1998). AOL’s business model still involved people paying primarily for access to information and experiences hosted on their servers. They were good at it as they still had tens of millions of paying subscribers, too, by the late 1990’s, let alone AIM users. By 2000, AOL would merge with Time Warner, as the latter had seen the future and wanted to move into the online world, the former, into media.
AIM soldiered on, even as its parent company declined in status, becoming more or less a division within Time Warner within a couple of years. AOL would finally shift the whole company towards a more open service, away from their “walled garden” in the next several years, even opening up AOL Mail to non-paying users. They’d also add XDrive, an online backup service, to their offerings. None of it stemmed the tide away from AOL.
AIM itself wasn’t immune to shifts in technology and how people organized themselves online. AIM itself would begin to fall away as a service as people would begin to move to SMS messaging and more importantly, social networking sites and Google Chat, itself released in 2011. And only now in 2017 is AOL shutting down AIM.
If I could have projected my 15, 20, or 25 year old self out to now, I would have recognized AOL, but under the name Facebook. Stick a blog with comments onto an AOL/AIM profile and make the whole service — groups, messenger, AOL Hometown/Journal, business listings, etc — available to anyone and not just paid users and you have back then, a proto-Facebook service.
I might recognize AOL as Box.com, Dropbox or Google Drive. Only Box.com was around at the same time as XDrive.
I might even see it as Hulu. AOL, through its merger with Time Warner could have lead streaming, given how much content it controlled or nominally had access to, with all the shows from HBO, TNT, and the other Time Warner-owned networks under its umbrella by 2000.
Yet, it wasn’t meant to be.
AOL, for whatever reason, never figured out in AIM’s heyday what organizations like Facebook seemed to know when they launched: in the coming era, users weren’t necessarily the customers, but they were often the product. AOL insisted on keeping paid subscribers long after they should have shifted to the attention-based model we see today. Google, Facebook, and others raced by and left AOL reeling. They would eventually open up more of the service and only charge for Internet access, but by then, things were too far gone.
And with respect to the kind of content AOL should have monetized, by the time that Netflix and Hulu came around, AOL was well depreciated from its former self.
AOL isn’t the only tech company that’s held onto its buggy whips as the rest of the industry moves towards the combustion engine.
Microsoft ignored mobile. It’s not even a player in that space. They had enough time to put together Office 365 and improved Sharepoint and OneDrive enough before Google Drive/GSpace could become a truly viable product. They’ll still be a player in cloud in the corporate space going forward. They were also able to take enough cues from Apple (design) and Google (transitioning to a leaner, more cloud-focused OS) to keep Windows 10 relevant. Unfortunately for AOL, they had the pieces (I didn’t even mention AOL Music or AOL photos), but never could put them together at the right time in the right ways.
As I get ready to let go of my old Buddy List of over 100 people, I do have memories like I’ve seen expressed on Twitter today. I’ve either met or kept up with a lot of people on AOL and AIM through the years. Old girlfriends. Writers. Early bloggers and online journalers (from the Open Diary days, wow that was so long ago, and maybe a few from BlackPlanet, too). Some moved to GChat with me. Some are long gone from my life. Some even dated back to when I was in high school. I’m sure I shared my grief over my mother’s death over AIM. My giddiness when the Ravens won Super Bowl 35. And many other moments and emotions between in days long passed.
I’m also reminded that in tech, tools come and go. I’ve used WordStar, ClarisWorks, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and Libre Office to do the same thing. ClarisWorks, Pagemaker, and Publisher to do some of the same things. AOL, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Mesesenger (Windows Live Messenger), and Google Talk (Google Chat/Hangouts) to do the same thing. And on and on. Something else may eventually succeed Twitter and Facebook after some change that the future managers there didn’t see coming. At one time, people thought AOL was the Internet and then the Internet passed it by. Today, many people think Facebook is the Internet. What will people think the Internet is in 20 years?
Just like the story in Acres of Gold, the answers are sometimes right under your feet. AOL had the pieces of this part of the future in its control and now all of those tools are have been and continue to be realized by other groups. Yet, they held onto the world as it was, for too long, and when the world moved on, they couldn’t catch up. Creativity, openness to new ideas, and the willingness to take a few risks are the way forward. The former world can pass away so quickly these days, it’s often hard to hold onto. Especially in tech with so many people sitting behind compilers these days, probably far more than the first time I ever sat in front of a C compiler back when AOL was the Internet.
I went full-speed ahead with a yes when my sister asked me to look at her book-in-progress. Or, to say it more accurately, we did not ourselves settle on a specific word to describe what I would be doing. I figured I’d do what I usually do in these situations, some mix of proofreading, copy editing, line editing, and maybe rewriting a thing here or two (though at this stage, it was pointless, since she’ll be doing a lot of rewriting herself). It’s what I often do when I look at something for someone, depending on my relationship with the person, when we haven’t agreed upon exactly what I’m doing. Since it was my sister, I thought I’d try to just be as helpful as I could be.
Leave a Comment So, without a definite mandate, I jumped into the document. I changed spelling errors. Ignored most of the things I felt might be grammatical problems because: 1) I’m not an English teacher and; 2) I don’t want to intrude too much on her voice. She has a strong, authoritative voice. She’s not pulling punches. I liked that. Besides, issues like that, she could fix herself once she read it out loud. They can be dealt with in a later draft.
She repeated herself in some areas and I pointed those out. Some things, I felt she hadn’t emphasized enough and could benefit the story. Some, I thought she’d lingered on or didn’t need. I told her those.
I finished in a couple of hours and I texted her.
Then, I got nervous.
Some of the possible usual worries, some not. Concern over whether I might have been too harsh. Should I have gone more general in my reading and not been as thorough? Was my own reading of it BS? I did my best to look at her and the people she discusses in the story as characters –not as people I know and have definite feelings about– and try to not impose my own perceptions or desires into her story.
That was the hardest.
For instance, I know my father, but not in the way she did. She grew up with him, in his house. I only spent one summer with her and my other sister and her mother, and while I remember a great deal of the events, I was just five. I probably misunderstood a bunch of things I did see, forget about the things I could have missed because I was five. She’s already told me about a lot that went down.
The rest of my time while my father was alive, I talked to him on the phone or saw him during his trips back home to Baltimore. Or, as technology progressed, via webcam whenever he felt like being bothered with firing up his computer (I wish he’d gotten himself an iPad before he passed; I tried).
I wanted to know more about the father who she said encouraged her to follow her passions. I never felt at ease having that conversation with him. We talked about what I was going to do, more than what I wanted to do. She says she received so many lessons and so much wisdom from him. I want to know what he told her. Life, being the way it was, he could have only told me so much.
I wanted to know more about her friends I only saw in passing as a kid. I remember them only as much as I remember the sherbet and the cake we ate on my birthday.
I wanted to know the adventures she went on before and after helping to watch after her younger siblings that summer in Diamond Bar. Some of these events are key in my own life. I’m writing about some of them.
The hope is that as much as I wanted to know more as myself, if she ends up following any of my suggestions, her eventual readers will benefit from knowing those things. That I, as a reader of a story with characters and events, have given suggestions that serve the story. More than I might ever serve myself and my curiosities. Or even my sister, for that matter. The story is bigger than the teller. Even in my own work. Especially in my own work. Even in what you’re reading right now.
According to Google Drive, by the time I’m finishing writing this post, she’s read at least some of the comments. Who knows if the suggestions will ever make it into the final product? If they’re helpful in making the story more successful, I hope they do. Otherwise, she should pitch them into traffic.
I am looking forward to the final product. And if there’s any value for her in what I’ve suggested and wants me to read it, the next draft.
Three or so years or so ago, my father asked me if I’d be interested in joining in a group video chat on Oovoo. He’d seen one of his grandchildren using it, become interested and wanted to host a multiperson video chat. I agreed, because why not?, set up my iPad 2 in the dining room and joined him and several other folks for a multi-state, multi-generational, multi-platform video chat.
Leave a Comment For him, it was a novelty and he never agreed to do another, usually under the guise of not remembering exactly how to work the software. Too bad.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the family, we haven’t done very much video chatting; my cousin Tim and I have done a couple of Facetime calls. I’ve been wanting to get him and his soon-to-be-three-year-old together on cam mostly so I can do all the stupid voices and stuff grownups do to entertain young kids. Maybe one of these days.
My little cousin also has a habit of calling me from my aunt’s phone. She decides she wants to talk to me, then tells my aunt to dial the number and off they go.
I’ve been trying to get my aunt into doing video for a long time now. We just replaced her Windows phone with an Android, so now she has Hangouts again. Which she doesn’t like. She doesn’t like anything on the phone that’s not easy. Which, for her and quite a few folks I know, Hangouts is not.
Enter Duo.
Back when Google announced Duo, they promised a dead simple video experience and Duo is exactly that. Whereas Hangouts requires you to have a friend list inside of the app, which you might or might not have, Duo only requires a telephone number and works with your existing contacts list. No Google account required. All you do is fire up the app, tap the button to make a video call, then either search your contacts or type the number you want to call.
On the other end, the recipient will see your name, number, and just as Google demonstrated back in May, video from your camera, a.k.a Knock Knock. Once the recipient accepts and starts the call, you can do the usual actions such as muting yourself and switching the camera. By default, your caller’s video plays on the larger part of the screen and your video plays in a smaller, cornered circle. You can change this and view your own video on the larger part of your screen.
However, unlike Facetime and Hangouts, you can’t turn the camera off.
One might consider turning the camera off as defeating the purpose of using the app, but you may be interested in doing a voice-only VoIP call or perhaps a call to a computer. That’s not what this is.
To that point, I couldn’t install Duo on my Galaxy Note tablet. I’m able to send and receive SMS messages from that tablet, so I imagine Duo might have worked the same way it did on my phone had the install gone through. If you want or need video calling on your Android tablet, you’ll probably have to stick with Hangouts or your other preferred app.
The install worked on my iPad, but with the device unable to receive SMS, there was no way to set up the app without an iPhone. Which I don’t have. Oh well.
As far as Duo’s settings go, you can turn off the vibration during ringing as well as Knock Knock, which will prevent video from your camera playing before the call is answered. You can also block numbers and limit the amount of mobile data used.
Video and audio quality were good over both WiFi and 4G/LTE.
Duo’s best feature is way beneath the hood: end-to-end encryption. If you have to say something you’re concerned will be intercepted, Duo’s your app. I wasn’t going to talk about saucy chat, but yeah, it’s probably good for things like saucy chat. But I’m not saying to use it for that.
A couple of items to bring up while discussing this app: carrier-supported video calling and iOS 10 VoIP integration.
I have T-Mobile and I can call other T-Mobile users as well as those whose MVNOs piggyback on T-Mobile (I’ve video called a Family Mobile user). Other carriers have video calling as well. As it stands now, I can initiate T-Mobile video calls directly from contacts or the phone dialer, which is more convenient than jumping into an app. Duo hooks into your contacts, but you can’t go into your contacts and launch Duo from there to make a call.
iOS 10 will allow people to use the app of their choice to make a call. And like Facetime and Hangouts now, some of these other apps will allow calls to and from devices like tablets and computers.
For an app like this, I’d like tighter integration into the phone’s dialer, but I can say the same with being able to launch Hangouts or whatever other app I might want to use to make a call, a la iOS 10. And in a world where that tighter integration is the norm, aside from its ease and encryption, I’m not sure long term, where Duo fits in. If the carriers allow inter-carrier video calling, how many will be willing to sacrifice privacy for ease of use?
But that’s a question for another day.
Back in today, overall, Duo does one thing and it does it pretty well. And easily, which means it might be the app that gets my auntie into video and when my little cousin is with her, I can make my stupid grownup faces and voices and entertain her.
Brief review of the V7 TD21BLK-1N Premium Messenger Bag I bought to carry my tablets. I highly recommend it.
Leave a Comment V7 TD21BLK-1N Premium Messenger Bag for 10.1-Inch Tablet, iPad Air & iPad
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