Adam Jury

On social networks such as Facebook, your friends and colleagues typically provide you with a vast amount of information about what they’re doing and how they’re feeling. You should use this information to be a better friend.

When a friend makes some sort of comment or status update that makes you wonder “What’s wrong?”, “What happened?” or similar questions—don’t ask them that generic question. Take a quick look at their profile and check what they’ve been doing lately: have they been to a wedding? Did a relative fall ill or die? Did they just break up with someone? Did they just get laid off, or get a new job? Spend just a few minutes—literally!—checking in on your friend, use the resources that they have made available to you, and then use what you’ve learned to help your friend. If they’ve just broken up with someone, what’s better for them to hear: “What happened?” or “Hey, I heard you got laid off. Let me know if you want to talk or hang out anytime, my schedule is clear for you and dinner is on me.”? React to the event that happened; don’t just react because an event happened.

Look at this sort of research as the same way you would handle an in-person situation with a friend or co-worker: if one of your co-workers comes into the office and they seem excessively frustrated or angry, do you immediately confront them or ask them what’s wrong? Likely not; you’re more likely to talk to another co-worker first to see if you can find out what’s up. Sometimes, it’s better to learn things indirectly so you can approach a situation more delicately or give someone additional time and space. This works the same online as it does off.

If they didn’t say anything recently that makes it obvious why they’re in such a mood, then go ahead and ask them. But bear in mind that if they haven’t broadcasted the reason before, they might not want to broadcast the reason now, so a private message or email (not an instant message) is probably the best way to ask.

If you care about your friends, it’s worth spending a few more minutes to make sure that they are actually cared for, and not just bombarded with already-answered questions.

As usual, when a social media network makes change in how it handles privacy settings, there’s been a kafuffle over Facebook’s recent privacy changes. I was nosing around the new privacy settings, and noticed something that I consider obnoxious: even though I was already logged into my account, I had to enter my password again to modify my Privacy settings:

“Your privacy settings are secured for your protection.”

This is an obvious deterrent to users modifying their own privacy settings, but I can buy the argument that it’s good to have that extra layer of protection, as people are likely to leave their Facebook account logged into public computers, and someone modifying their privacy settings would obviously be ugly. Of course, Facebook and their advertisers and other partners all serve to gain the less people know about and modify their privacy preferences.

Beyond that, I was curious, so I went back to the preferences and clicked on Deactivate Account, and sure enough — you can deactivate your account without inputting your password. Just fill in a CAPTCHA and bam, you are dead to Facebook! Like a zombie you can shamble back through Facebook simply by logging in again—but shouldn’t deleting accounts also require you to prove via password that you are who you’re deleting?

Dan Benjamin at Hivelogic wrote a nice article about effectively using your “Away” message when instant messaging.

Here’s two other things that I think is necessary for efficient IM communications

Ask Your Question, Don’t Ask to Ask

Don’t say hello and wait for someone to respond; just ask your question. Don’t ever say “Hey, are you there?” or “Hey, can I ask you a question?” — just ask it.

Situation 1:

Bob: Hey Adam?
[time lapse of 2 hours]
Adam: Sorry, what did you want?
[Bob is now AFK, time lapse of another hour.]
Bob: Hey, I was wondering how big the Gear chapter was?
Adam: It’s 62 pages. [Total time lapse of 3 hours]

Situation 2:

Bob: Hey Adam, I need to know how big the gear chapter is.
[time lapse of 2 hours]
Adam: It’s 62 pages. [No matter how long the time lapse is here before Bob reads my IM, I've fulfilled my commitment.]

Situation 2 is far preferable. If you know that the person isn’t available, you may be better off sending an email or posting to whatever project management software you use — but simply saying “hello” does not get work finished, no matter what communications tool you’re using.

Use Auto-Away Sparingly

Some IM clients will set you as “automatically away” if you are idle for more than a certain period of user-definable time. In practice, I think this feature doesn’t work, especially when the time is set low, as the defaults often are. I notice that a lot of people, even when they’re working or otherwise busy, will notice that their IM client has set them to auto-away and instantly fiddle with their IM client to reset their status to Available — resulting in the user “bouncing” around their friend’s buddy lists.

If you want to use auto-away, I suggest setting it to a high value: at least an hour. That way it will work for you when you’ve been caught up in a long phone call or you fell asleep or got kidnapped by friends [or aliens!], but it won’t get triggered when you’re simply busy working.

Turn Your IM Client Off

I should probably do this more, at least with my business-related accounts: if you’re going to be unavailable on IM for a period of time that is extreme [such as an entire daytime period during your co-worker's workday] — turn your IM client right off. Seeing things like “(1d) Away” in my buddy list just frustrates me, like those people are wasting my screen real estate. I sort these people into a custom group, “Idlers,” and minimize that group so I never see them unless I’m specifically looking for them.

I use Twitter [I'm adamjury there, surprise surprise] for a lot of things; keeping in touch with friends, following news, helping random people with graphic design and technology issues, watching people talk about stuff I work on, and promoting my work and myself in general. So I was kind of bummed to realize, last night, that none of my tweets were being indexed in Twitter’s internal search engine. This means that anyone searching for keywords might not see tweets where I discuss them.

When I found out, I did the usual account check — I wasn’t suspended, I hadn’t put myself into Protected mode accidentally, I could search for other usernames that I use, no issues there. Checked Twitter’s various help resources and their blog and status pages with no luck. So, on a lark, I set my stream to be protected, and then unprotected again, thinking that it might cause Twitter to re-index me. No dice there.

I sent off a polite help request and went to bed. In the morning, it was answered, and it pointed me to this support thread. At this time, 59 pages of people who aren’t properly listed in the search [and those are only people that know about it, care about it enough to report it, and found the right place to report it!] and over half of the users reporting this issue have reported it in the last week, although it was first reported on May 29th.

What’s up, Twitter?

To figure out if you’re not being indexed, visit the following Twitter search link, but fill in your own name!

Edit: There’s a hashtag for this … #searchfail. But since the people being hit by this bug aren’t indexed in the search, the hashtag is gaining little traction.

Edit, June 22: Still not fixed yet, still no acknowledgement from Twitter on their status page or anywhere else.

Yesterday, Apple released Safari 4 Beta. Instantly, people began to cry on Twitter, because the totally awesome can’t live without it password manager 1Password didn’t get work with it.

Within a few hours, Agile Software had upgraded 1Password and pushed that version out, so it now works with Safari 4 Beta.

Then, they began the process of answering people via their twitter account, telling them about the new version. They sent out a lot of tweets to different users who didn’t follow them, so they had to use the public reply functionality, not a direct [private] message. And then someone complained:

@1Password Do you know, what a “DM” in Twitter is? -> You produce too many public replys!

And this, I say, is bullcrap. There is no “you shouldn’t send public replies” guideline on Twitter, and 1Password couldn’t send Direct Messages to many of these people because you can only send a DM to someone who follows you.

If you don’t like that someone uses Twitter to—*gasp*—actually talk to people, then don’t follow them, or use a client like TweetDeck that allows you to filter users into different categories. Twitter is many things to many different people, and you can’t expect everyone you follow to use it in the same way you do.

[I'm adamjury on Twitter.]

I had meant to launch a new blog and videocast late last year, but it got delayed for a variety of reasons, and then last week I ended up “accidentally” launching a new blog, and then today, I pre-launched the videocast blog.

The videocast blog is Dirty Words Designs, which will be about Adobe InDesign and graphic design in general. It will be a combo of videocasts and written posts with trips/tips/links/etc.

The second is Best of Three Falls, which will be about the worked gladiatorial art of pro wrestling, and the not-worked gladiatorial sport of mixed martial arts. I moved all the wrestling-related posts from this blog over to there.

Apple stuff, work stuff, and general life talk all stays here.

NetNewsWire is a great RSS client for OSX. It was acquired by NewsGator in late 2005, and since then has continued to improve and be awesome-r.

And now, it’s free, along with NewsGator’s other consumer products, including a RSS client for Windows, an RSS Outlook plugin, and a RSS client for some PDA platforms. NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons is very pleased with this new direction.

I’ve been a happy paying user of NNW since early 2005, and it’s very cool that more people will be exposed to it from now on.

Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd is interviewed by Wired.

Playing for Keeps is the newest piece of fiction being podcasted by well-known podcaster and author Mur Lafferty. Playing for Keeps takes place in Seventh City, the birthplace of super powers, and the story of Keepsie Branson, one of the Seventh’s residents that has powers … but not enough power to be a villain or hero.

Playing for Keeps is being podcasted, distributed in PDF, and there’s also additional user-created content: a secondary podcast called Stories of the Third Wave, with more on the way. I recommend listening to the actual podcast, as Mur’s faux drunk voices always make me smile.

Amit Agarwal has some great suggestions on how to trim the size of your saved GMail.