1. "Why would I want to know every little detail about what my friends are doing from Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed?"
2. "How do you not get overwhelmed by all the people you follow/friend?"

My short answer is I don't treat it like a fire hose I have to drink down, I treat it like a stream I dip my feet in every so often. To explain this statement, I need to first talk about friends and travel.

I was born in Vancouver, spent my formative years in Hong Kong and then returned to Vancouver for the last two years of high school and college before moving to Austin for my first job. All this moving was a mixed blessing. I was able to experience many different perspectives and made a wide range of friends from all over the world. On the other hand, there were few friends that shared my experiences throughout.

Whenever I visited Hong Kong, which is roughly annually, I meet up with my childhood friends. Conventional thinking would say that, because we haven't seen each other for a year, we'd have a lot more to catch up on than say, someone here in San Francisco that I saw just the day before.

Anyone who has experience with this can tell you that it simply isn't true. When you're apart that long, conversation topics feel like they need to be a minimum level of significance to be worth discussing: career changes, marital status change, buying of property, perhaps a new family member, etc. A sample conversation might be like this:

Friend: "So how've you been?" Me: "Great. Things are going well. I got engaged!" Friend: "Congrats! You still doing that computer thing?" Me: "Yeah. Still at the same place. You still at the same firm?" Friend: "Yeah, 3 years now." Me: "Wow ..." Friend: "MmHmm ..."

In contrast, the friends you see every day or every week are the ones you can talk to for hours. Why? Because any topic is fair game. You don't feel like you have to filter out the more mundane topics because it's such a significant event to be catching up with the person. How was that movie? Did you go climbing yesterday? Did you see that crazy YouTube video? No topic is too trivial.

So how is any of that relevant to the information overload of Twitter and Facebook?

To me, Twitter and Facebook updates represent the mundane, everyday conversations that I could and would have with everyone if I could. By seeing the stream of updates from my friends, I have much more context into their lives, and a feeling that I can converse with them about smaller things. To use a clich]]> Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:46:01 -0800 http://virb.com/kevnull/posts/text/1067031 http://virb.com/kevnull/posts/text/1054348 I grew up on anime. In particular, like every teenager in Asia, I grew up watching, reading and in my case, drawing Dragonball Z. It was easily the most popular series in its time (the equivalent title nowadays would be Naruto). So when I found out there was going to be a live action movie, I was pretty terrified. As it turns out, I was rightfully so. Here's the casting for the main character, Son Goku:

I'm not particularly active in the local Asian (North) American scene nor do I keep up much with local or national issues related to Asian Americans. But one pet peeve of mine has always been the role of Asians in Hollywood.

In the movie 21 based on the novel "Bringing Down the House" which, in turn, was based on a true story from MIT, the main character was converted from Asian to Caucasian. What was particularly irksome about this casting was that the story clearly states that most members of the blackjack team were minorities. In fact, they needed to be minorities because it was much more convincing for minorities to act like rich heirs playing their parents' money at the high stakes tables.

The MIT team thrived by choosing BPs [Big Players] who fit the casino mold of the young, foolish, and wealthy. Primarily nonwhite, either Asian or Middle Eastern, these were the kids the casinos were accustomed to seeing bet a thousand bucks a hand.

I vented about that so much that my friend Ernie wrote about it on his group blog, 8 Asians.

Now, they can't even seem to feel comfortable casting an Asian as a lead on a Japanese animation adaptation about martial arts.

In this regard, I am frequently disappointed about the role of Asians in North America and sometimes wonder if more needs to be done. More disturbing than the answer to questions like, "will we ever see an Asian play a lead role in a movie without having to play an Asian?", "when will we see an Asian winning an Academy Award for Best Actor or Actress?" or "how long before an Asian President seems likely?" is how infrequently these questions ever seems to be asked.

Stupid, minor, seemingly inconsequential decisions like this casting serve to remind me how narrow minded mainstream Hollywood and its audience can still be -- and make me wonder how far out I can extrapolate that generalization.

It seems that Twinkle is taking advantage of their popularity in a completely irresponsible manner.

Before I go into details, let me quickly recap how Twitter's conversations work. When you publicly reply to a person on Twitter, you type @USERNAME. So if my username was kevin, you'd type "@kevin that's so true!". Twitter and pretty much all Twitter applications support this syntax by providing a "replies" view which shows you every public Twitter that starts with @YOURUSERNAME. So you can see that it's fairly important for these usernames to remain unique.

Enter Twinkle, who turn out to not just be a Twitter application, but a social network of their own. A person who uses Twinkle doesn't have to be a Twitter user as well. They might just be Twinkle users, with Twinkle usernames. Thus, there are now two sets of namespaces with duplicate identities that might belong to two different people (a person named Peter on Twitter and a different person named Peter on Twinkle).

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem. I have usernames all over the place. However, Twinkle decided that the way a Twinkle user should reply to other Twinkle users is also with the @ syntax and if the poster happens to use Twitter as well, that reply goes to Twitter.

What does this mean?

Let's say there is a Twitter and Twinkle user and his username is Peter on both services. He has a friend who is on Twinkle only and her username is Jane. Suppose Jane says something witty on Twinkle and Peter decides to respond:

@jane LOL. That's pretty brilliant, mate.

As a user of both services, his response goes out on both channels -- Twitter and Twinkle.

At the same time, JaneB, a Twitter user who has never heard of Twinkle and]]> Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:51:36 -0800 http://virb.com/kevnull/posts/text/1041875 http://virb.com/kevnull/posts/text/1031529 I watched The Times of Harvey Milk documentary (which is on Hulu) before watching this movie. It's interesting to see the same story told twice, once from afar and once as though you were a part of it. One thing is certainly allows for is a reference point to recognize just how good Sean Penn was as Milk. I occasionally thought, "Wait! This is Sean Penn!" during the movie. As others have said, this movie makes me proud to be a San Franciscan and ashamed that we didn't fight harder against Prop 8. [imdb link]

Last Christmas, I received a hoodie from my friend Diana. It was a black hoodie with black imprints of ninja silhouettes. Little did she know the extent of its awesomeness. It turned out that the hoodie, when zipped up, transformed the wearer into a ninja. Not only that, the inside of the hoodie had a designated nunchuk holder. This hoodie quickly became the best hoodie I've ever seen.

Then this Christmas, at the Raptr holiday party, we all received Raptr branded hoodies. Much to my chagrin, as awesome as the hoodies are, we didn't go through with the idea to put the dino eyes on the top of the hoods. When I suggested that I should perhaps iron on the eyes to my hoodie, my fianc]]> Tue, 30 Dec 2008 03:30:58 -0800 http://virb.com/kevnull/posts/text/1005959 http://virb.com/kevnull/posts/text/957248 I was trying to create an iPhone ringtone using Rogue Amoeba's MakeiPhoneRingTone application. This applicaiton requires AAC files to be dragged in. "No problem," I thought, "iTunes does AAC conversions." And it does but apparently, the interface to get there has become really obfuscated so I thought I'd document how to do it. Everything else out there is horribly outdated and inaccurate.

First, you might find on Apple, this support document about how to do this. That process, though only 6 months old, is also outdated but it did help me figure out the real process.

Here's the process to convert media to the format you want now:

1. Go to your preferences (iTunes>Preferences on OSX and Edit>Preferences on Windows).
2. Under the first tab "General", there is an area where you decide how to deal with Audio CDs. Clearly, the import settings here apply to ALL import settings. Click on "Import Settings ...".
3. Under the "Import Using" dropdown, select the format you want to convert your media to.
4. Optionally, select the quality you desire.
5. Close all the preferences windows.
6. Select one or more songs from your iTunes library.
7. If you right click over your selection, you will see the option to "Create AAC version" or "Create MP3 version" etc. Or you can access the same option from the "Advanced" menu.

In case anyone is interested, before converting them to AAC, I used Audacity to format my music to a manageable, ringtone chunk.

I've got two artists that I'd like to recommend, both of whom happened to feature Asian-American roots. The first is a friend and fellow San Franciscan Goh Nakamura. In his words,

Goh Nakamura is a San Francisco Bay Area based musician who writes ditties about parking tickets, impossible crushes and faraway dreamlands.

Goh's music is a collection of bittersweet melodies and I've been listening to his work since my former roommate Min Jung introduced me to him and his work at local events.

His vocals are soulful and the lyrics charming in an unpretentious way. He just released his second album, which he's been working for years on and if you're in the Bay Area, he will be playing one of his largest gigs yet as the headliner at the Rickshaw Stop. More importantly, you can sample his music for free. Check out his album, Ulysses.

The second artist is one I've been loving since my friend Leonard had them booked at a SxSW Upcoming.org party two years ago. The Little Ones had two addictive EPs that I used to listen to on repeat so I was instantly intrigued when I heard that they'd released their first full length album.

Morning Tide is instantly catchy, in your head, addictive and contains all the elements that define indie pop. It's now at the top of my rotation and has been since I purchased it last week. Once again, it's on repeat. It's available on iTunes but I recommend checking out their music on Last.fm and then buying it at Amazon MP3, where the music is DRM-less.

Instead of rehashing what the site does, I encourage you to check out our blog post about it. The Ars Technica write-up on us is also quite detailed and accurate. Better yet, go to Raptr and sign up!

Those who have managed to remain in contact with me during this ride will know that it's been many long days and nights leading up to this. To the friends and family that read this blog, I'm hoping to email/talk/see/phone you more often now that the product is out but don't be surprised if I submerge again to really sink my teeth into writing my book.

Every time I write one of these blog posts talking about something I've been working on for awhile, I feel like I'm writing some sort of awards acceptance speech ("I'd like to thank the Academy") so I'll just leave it as a an announcement. Go check it out.

However, a friend recently mentioned Facebook's licensing policies as they pertain to photos and all content uploaded. I took a look and hear is what I found (emphasis my own):

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Now optimistically, this means, "we can use your stuff to help promote Facebook" but there is certainly sufficient language there to suggest they can do whatever the hell they want with it, including sell the photos. Granted, there's a clause right after that says:

If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

But that hardly makes me feel better since wherever I store my photos, I plan to store for a long time. On Flickr, I can choose how my photos are licensed to the world and who gets to use them. As far as I know, nobody - not Flickr, not Yahoo! - can sell my photos or use them without my permission unless I explicitly set a license permitting such to the public.

Is this something that I'm just late to the game with? Is it common knowledge? Or am I reading too much into the text?

After two years of discussions with Lou Rosenfeld, I've finally signed with his publishing company, Rosenfeld Media, to write a book entitled See What I Mean: How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas. For those that don't know, Rosenfeld Media is like an O'Reilly for user experience books. They focus on compact, practical methods books for the practitioner. I will be joining such luminary authors as my friends and colleagues Indi Young and Luke Wroblewski.

As the title suggests, the book will be an extension of the workshop and presentations I've been presenting at various conferences. The subject matter has been expanded in scope but the gist remains the same: comics are an under utilized method for telling a story in a concise and accessible manner and See What I Mean will attempt to explain how to create comics for this purpose--without necessarily knowing how to draw.

I wrote about the full story of how the book came to be on the book blog.

It's hard to describe the excitement and trepidation I feel. I've been writing pieces for OK/Cancel and to a lesser extent, here on this blog for many years but never a full length book. In addition, balancing the writing of this book with the responsibilities at Raptr will be challenging. Coley has been amazingly supportive about the whole endeavour and I'm sure hers and the support of my friends and family will carry me to the finish line this fall.

My goal is to complete this book and have it out by South by Southwest next year. I won't be blogging much more about the book here as the book has its own place. If you're interested in the development of the book, I hope you add your name to my book's notification mailing list and contribute to the discussions there!