MicroHoo!

Microsoft and Yahoo have officially joined forces to work as a single search engine to challenge Google. Yahoo will now use Microsoft's bing search for all of its sites.

Many news outlets are calling this a huge game changer and a bold move by Microsoft to disrupt Google's success. While I am surprised at Microsoft's recent changes in their company attitude, the coming Microsoft stores and PC commercials challenging Apple, I just don't see this as a real threat to Google.

Google hasn't gotten to the top of the hill and just rested, they're constantly innovating and producing amazing new services. With years of that innovation, all of which has been free to the public, they've built an immense, loyal following. Ultimately people will use the superior product and bing has incorporated some interesting features, such as their in-search video, but at best I think this will simply be a challenge to Google to innovate at a faster pace. They'll need to produce either similar features or better, and given Google's track record I can't see them letting us down.

Digital Selves

There are a number of services online that make an "e-penis" list of the things I've listened to, read, played, or watched. I religiously update both my Shelfari and MyAnimeList accounts, and Last.fm takes care of itself as does Steam. I'm trying to find a comparable site to keep my movie reviews and ratings, and I was using Flixster on Facebook until I logged into the application with my actual Flixster account and it deleted the year and a half of ratings and reviews I had made while not technically "logged in." Great feature. IMDb is likely the place to go, and Mashable put out a list of 10 top social networking sites for movie lovers.

I'm both curious and squeamish about exploring what makes these kinds of sites so addictive. Squeamish because I'm afraid all I can point to is they help me feel like I've done something "productive" with activities that might not otherwise be considered "productive". Sure, I just logged two hours in Team Fortress 2 and grabbed a handful of achievements, or I finished three more episodes of Nodame Cantabile, but I could have been spending that time studying Japanese. I can't help but come to this conclusion because I also tend not to be very social on these sites. Sure I've got real life friends on Shelfari and Steam, and I keep an eye on their updates, but I'm mostly content to see myself chip away at the massive list of films I haven't seen or books I haven't read.

Is there inherent value in having these lists? Beyond justifying how I spend my time and sometimes not being able to remember all the media I've consumed.

I'd Like to Buy the World a Twitter

Rumors are flying that Facebook is developing a Twitter app, another one of those boxes on your wall, that would, well, let you use Twitter within Facebook. This would keep Facebook users on the site and let the less tech-savvy explore Twitter while not having to leave their familiar Facebook home. I have a feeling this large portion of the Facebook demographic would be interested in Twitter if they tried it but likely can't be bothered to go figure out how it works or jump into a new service where there's no one they know. It may not bring over the long-time power users of Twitter however, as it remains to be seen how feature rich the app is or even what it looks like. Without the features of desktop clients such as Seesmic Desktop to parse my Twitter information, I wouldn't be terribly interested in switching over to this app.

As much as I abhor Facebook's misguided contortions in its attempt to block the rise of Twitter, I have to admit this is a smart move to co-opt the service's users and it would be a win-win situation for both services. It would keep Facebook users on Facebook and improve the ability of the service to keep users in touch with their friends, its core value. At the same time it would bring Twitter to the attention of Facebook's 250 million users.

Facebook for Better or Worse

Facebook has made two changes to its service recently that reflect the two directions it could go in: the ability to send status updates to the entire Facebook network, and the placing of the Event feature directly in the "What's On Your Mind?" box.

The first change, the ability to send your status updates to "Everyone" on Facebook, allows you to broadcast your updates to everyone on the Facebook network. It reflects the company's desire to be everything to everyone. It's a move clearly designed to target Twitter and co-opt their design into Facebook.

The second change, the placing of the Event feature directly in the Status Update box, makes it easier to send a quick event to your network/friends, such as getting together for a drink after work that night. It's a useful enhancement of Facebook's core features, and it makes the service more useful in communicating with your friends.

The status update change has gotten more press because it's an attack on a company that Facebook sees as a competitor. It's the wrong move. Facebook is a useful collection of tools to keep in touch with your friends and organize your social life around. It's become as big as it has because it streamlined the social networking concept. (Remember how you had to go through four different pages to post a comment to your friend's wall on MySpace? Not to mention all the bugs.) Twitter is a service best used for getting news and updates from and about important people and events. Sure, many people have their friends on Twitter but I know my friends' Tweets get lost in the deluge of other stories from the celebrities and news outlets I follow. On Facebook I can get, and want, just updates from my friends about their lives.

By trying to be all the hot things on the Internet at once and attack Twitter, Facebook is losing what made it popular. Allowing me to send my status updates to everyone on Facebook does not enhance my ability to stay in touch with my friends. As Mashable points out in the above article, this change will at best be wasted man hours in programming and at worst will erode Facebook users' confidence that the network is a place for them.

Fascinating Developments in Freedom

Two major stories broke today: China has indefinitely postponed their Green Dam Censorship Software initiative, and coverage of the Iran Election on Twitter has exceeded 2 million Tweets.

It's cliche to say that current technology is changing the way we interact at a basic level but this is evidence that it really is. These are political movements in traditionally repressive countries that were fueled by technology. In the case of Green Dam, traditionally apathetic youth were galvanized to protest when their technology was being tampered with. Without the massive coverage on Twitter we would have very little knowledge of the size and extent of protests in Iran, and no knowledge of the protests from the average people involved.

We've seen for years how technology evolves too quickly to be squashed by the powers that be (the U.S. music industry), and we're seeing that same power applied to the political sphere. It's exciting to see technology improving lives in such positive ways and becoming a tool for political change in the world.

Say Goodbye to Cash

There have been a number of organizations looking at the concept of a cashless society recently. Here in Japan the Suica card, which started as merely an electronic railpass, has expanded to use at convenience stores, vending machines, restaurants, parking garages, and practically any business which chooses to use their card readers as a payment option. The ability to use mobile phones as Suica cards/accounts has been introduced as well. Now the GSM Association, responsible for the most widely accepted mobile phone standard in the world, is looking at bringing banking-like services, such as money transfers, bill payments, and savings to mobile phones.

This would apparently be most beneficial to a large number of the world's poor who live without banking services but do have a mobile phone. People in this financial bracket spend an inordinate amount of time organizing these services, and making order of this chaos by tying everything easily to their mobile phone and its account would bring some much needed stability to their lives.

I'm tentatively optimistic about the idea of a cashless society. Of course I see the benefit described above and believe this is a great step to improve the standard of living in third-world countries. I imagine it would take a huge financial burden off most countries by removing the major services and industries required to keep a cash-based society going. Financial crises could be averted or lessened as governments could minutely adjust their currencies. I'd also love to be able to stop carrying around a massive bag of change in my pocket.

On the other hand, my inner luddite can't help but feel scared of letting go of such a central concept to modern life. My head is filled with nightmarish visions of the new kinds of financial crime and corporate abuse possible when our livelihood is converted to just 1s and 0s.

But that may be part of its value. Converting this fetishized object of modern life to a digital number may aleviate some of the societal obsession with money and it's attainment. When all the money you have and the money you use in your daily life is simply a number instead of a physical bunch of things you can hold, carry, and hoard, accumulating those things is likely to weigh less on your mind. I'd certainly like to see our values change to shift away from assigning so much self-worth to how much money we make. Maybe a cashless society would be just the medicine we need for our collective psychosis.

Arrr! Ripe for the Plundering!

I ate, slept and breathed Lucasarts games throughout my childhood. Staying up until the early morning on school nights playing Day of the Tentacle or Full Throttle. The lack of point and click adventures is a big gaping hole in current gaming culture as far as I'm concerned (as well as the deplorable lack of space combat sims).

Monkey Island was the series that got me into those games, the first one being one of my very first computer games. So with glee I read the E3 announcement of not only Lucasarts releasing a graphically updated version of the original game, but a monthly installment series from the company responsible for the Sam & Max restart.

However the E3 trailer for Tales of Monkey Island exposes the same failing that the new Sam & Max series had: the humor. The old, irreverent, clever wit you found in these original games is gone, replaced with "wacky" phrases and lame situational humor. ("Sword of Hot Monkey Vengeance" and Threepwood's "What just happened?" after his possession, etc.) What really made these games great were the writers behind them. Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer wrote with a clever, sharp wit (any gamer who lived through that period is familiar with "You fight like a dairy farmer.") and filled their games with unique characters that were riffs on pirate story stereotypes, like the vegetarian cannibal headhunters or used galleon salesman "Stan".

I'm often against continuations of old intellectual properties both because of the careless manner in which they're often handled and because the stories told in the originals often are complete unto themselves. I don't mind seeing more games based upon Monkey Island or Sam & Max, because those games were more about the characters than a self-contained plot. However a quick slap-dash of Monkey Island graphics over a generic comedy script destroys everything that makes it Monkey Island.