In response to a few bug reports and feature requests, I’ve updated Freedom. The new version should fix the “asking for your password at 5 minute intervals” affecting some users, and it now allows up to 6 hours of Freedom. To update Freedom, download the new version and drag it to your Applications folder.
Please also let me know if you run into any bugs. I was able to track down the bug in Freedom 0.1-2 to a problem described in an Apple Technical Note, so I’m feeling more confident.
This week has been an exciting one over at ClaimID. Working with two great companies – JanRain and Vidoop/Confident, we’ve introduced some new technologies that make the OpenID process simpler, and more secure. For us, it is a true win-win! Read more about both announcements at ReadWriteWeb and over at the ClaimID blog:
In case you’re wondering how things are going over at ClaimID (I realize I don’t promote it that much here at Unit Structures), we’re growing at a fast clip – about 10% each month. This has caused a few scaling headaches, but we’ve taken the growth in stride. In the past year, we haven’t vastly changed the product – we’re sticking to the mission we pledged: making OpenID friendly and easy, being a trustworthy provider, and embracing open technologies. The fact that the market embraces that approach is really rewarding.
Over the summer, we’ll be thinking of some ways to streamline ClaimID. We feel that ClaimID can be at the core of a useful, productive identity experience on the web, and we’re going to develop it in that direction. In 2005 when we were brainstorming the project, we knew adoption was a few years off; I’m glad we’ve persevered, as it seems there’s some really great stuff right around the corner. And we certainly look forward to serving you for the next three years (and more)!
Although the semester is winding down, this is looking like a very busy week – my class presents their final projects tomorrow (and we’re having cupcakes), one of my students has a thesis defense on Thursday, and I’m giving two talks this week. Yow.
The first talk is today, a guest lecture to COMP 380 at UNC-Chapel Hill. The talk will be at 5:30 in Sitterson 014 (a classroom where I took CS classes in my undergrad days, no less). On Friday, I’ll be speaking to ASIST at UNC. That talk will be at noon, in the Pleasants Family Room in Wilson Library. The talks I’m giving have the title “Identity and Interaction in the age of Facebook.”
On Friday, I released Freedom, software that fights the oppression of the internet. Incredibly, through the power of del.icio.us, Reddit, Twitter, blogs and endless Tumblr’s, Freedom has spread widely, with tens of thousands of views. Even more incredibly, I received a donation for my efforts, proving that Freedom is truly on the march. Here’s some of my favorite Freedom coverage:
And while most traffic to Freedom came in from the web or blogs, a substantial bit of Freedom’s traffic and buzz came from Twitter (which I was able to track via Tweetscan’s great, real-time analytics).
Techcrunch and I agree that smaller, more personal networks are the next wave. This has large implications for social (viral) content distribution. First a caveat: By volume, blogs are still king. However, compared to blogs, with their monolith long-post form, and invisible audience, these “closer” networks better fit social content. What do people want to do on the internet? They want to share links. Twitter and Tumblr are precisely tailored to link-based message passing (the fuel of viral traffic), aligning perfectly with our desires.
The real value of “close” networks, in my opinion, is knowledge of one’s audience. Being able to look at one’s Twitter followers and know who is reading you is incredibly powerful, if for no other reason than the milieu of sharing is pre-established. Ever notice how people on Twitter don’t adopt personas? Knowing one’s audience frees users to create as themselves, which is the ultimate sustainable model. The fact that viral content has moved into these close networks is very significant – and we’ll only see more of it going forward.
A few years ago, I used to judge the quality of a coffeeshop by the speed of its wireless network. Now that I’m working on my dissertation, I find myself desperately searching out places where I can be network-free. In this college town, it is difficult to find a work or study place where you can avoid clouds of wireless internet.
In an attempt to resist the encroachment of network into the spaces of productivity, 
I’ve created Freedom. Freedom is a Mac application that disables your computer’s networking capabilities for a selected time interval. Some of you may turn off your network when you need to be productive; I’ve done that, but always found myself popping the network on at my next break (and losing 20 minutes to YouTube/Wikipedia/etc). Freedom takes this approach a step further, locking you out of your network for your selected time interval; Freedom enforces freedom.
To download freedom, visit the project’s page. After you download, simply mount the disk, and drag Freedom.app to your application folder. To run Freedom, double-click the application, provide your password and time interval, and Freedom will do all the rest.
Once Freedom’s time interval completes, it will display a friendly message and enable your network interfaces. A reboot is the only circumvention of the time limits you choose. The hassle of rebooting means you’re less likely to cheat, and you’ll be more productive. Simply closing the application will not return your network interfaces. When first getting used to Freedom, I suggest using the software for short periods of time.
For those who may worry, Freedom is non-destructive. It uses simple POSIX functions for the management of network interfaces. Therefore, if you’re a sysadmin, you can circumvent Freedom. However, for the rest of us, Freedom is technical enough to enforce downtime. With Freedom, you can be network-free to write, code, design, arrange or just GTD.
NOTICE: For Freedom support, please go to Freedom’s new website, http://macfreedom.com
For the past few days, I’ve been playing around with Muxtape. For those who haven’t seen it, Muxtape is a
website that allows you to create and share digital mixtapes. For those of us raised in the age of the mixtape, Muxtape is a wonderful find; it evokes warm memories of a youth spent hunched over a dubbing cassette deck, creating mixes for friends and (potential) loved ones. Muxtape is also surprisingly authentic – a “one name, one tape” policy is appropriately analog, and it also takes some time to create/upload (likely more a technical limitation than purposeful authenticity, but I like it).
Muxtape creator Justin Ouellette describes the project: “you can create a muxtape and upload up to twelve songs curated by you”. I’m particularly interested by the curation aspect, and not just because I’m in a LIS School. I see curation, and services built around curation as a tremendous emergent trend in social software.
Lets place things in a historical context. During Web 1.0, space was expensive, skills were limted, and digital media capabilities were nascent. The result was a curated web, but one with sub-par content that wasn’t personally engaging. Web 2.0 stood in sharp contrast to Web1; space was limitless, few skills were required, and rich media was everywhere. To our collective surprise, unlimited content proves an non-engaging as poor content. The curated web represents a reaction to this abundance: the re-introduction of curation (or editorship) is a very natural step towards making abundance engaging.
Look around at the software you love: your small, curated networks in Twitter stand in opposition to the monolith Facebook. Flickr, a product where norms enforce heavy curation, is a sense of pride for many. This trend continues in software like Tumblr, Seesmic, etc. – these exciting new networks create small, curated and close spaces for production/consumption. This stands sharply in opposition to the endless decontextualized mess of software-of-the-moment Friendfeed, as well as the market-centric ideologies of data portability. On a related note, Thomas Vander Wal elegantly addresses the context problem in a video he’s entitled “Granular Social Network.”
This is an exciting new direction for consumer web technologies. And while abundance works in some contexts (Google search), it doesn’t in most social contexts. How we dress, who we hang out with, etc. are all natural forms of curation – it only makes sense that our software should reflect this behavior. The market is not full of transparent-society ideologues like those who run venture capital firms.
Finally, I think there’s an important point to be made regarding form. Perhaps in reaction to the richness and complexity of Web 2.0, our production is increasingly embracing simplicity. The arms race on the web is no longer about technology, but about imagination. There are nearly countless forms into which small text, or mp3, or photos
, can be assembled. To this extent, the fuel of the next web is bricolage, as opposed to the more inherently techno-capitalist notions of mashup and remix.
Oh yes, you can find my awesome muxtape here: http://chimprawk.muxtape.com.
Fred Stutzman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studies privacy and social media. He is the designer of the productivity software Freedom and Anti-Social, and co-founder of the identity management service ClaimID.com.
