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We don’t know exactly what’s new yet, but Palm’s released firmware version 1.0.4 for Pres on Sprint (not to say there are any other Pres out there at the moment, anyhow). Stay tuned for details.

Update: Looks like the only changes here address security vulnerabilities — and interestingly, Palm gives a shout-out to Townsend Ladd Harris (a Pre homebrewer no less) who helped find them. Cheers to that.

Update 2: Sadly, Palm’s plugged the hole that allowed homebrew apps on the phone without a jailbreak, though software you’ve already installed on the phone will continue to work. The hole that’s been plugged was admittedly dangerous to leave open (installing apps via a link in email), though rooting and installing otherwise remain unchanged as far as we know.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Palm Pre gets upgraded to 1.0.4 (update: homebrew installs via email dead for now) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s now clear that the bane of my next year will be questions about the future of the newspaper industry from journalists. I don’t blame them—newspapers are indeed one of the industries most affected by Free (although that’s just one manifestation of their larger problem: having lost their monopoly on consumer attention). And neither I nor anybody else has any good answers, other than the newspaper business is probably going to shrink but not go away, and that the business model will have to change.

But since journalist Malcolm Gladwell has somewhat parochially decided to make the Future of Paid Journalism the focus of his review of Free (which is, ironically, free on the New Yorker’s website; perhaps this is something Gladwell should take up with David Remnick?), I’ll try to respond in a bit more detail.

Gladwell (who, by the way, I both like and admire, so let’s call this an intellectual debate between corporate cousins) writes:

“[Anderson argues that] newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” [Anderson] predicts, and he goes on:

“There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won’t be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.”

Anderson is very good at paragraphs like this—with its reassuring arc from “bloodbath” to “salvation.” His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.””

Well, I wouldn’t propose this as the future of all newspapers, but my model comes from personal experience. About three years ago, I started a parenting blog called GeekDad, and invited a few friends to join in. We soon attracted a large enough audience that it became apparent that we couldn’t post enough to satisfy the demand, so I put out an open call for contributors. Out of the scores who replied, I picked a dozen and one of them was Ken Denmead (at right, with Penn of Penn & Teller).

Ken is, by day, a civil engineer working on the BART extension in the SF Bay Area. But by night he an amazing community manager. His leadership skills impressed me so much that I turned GeekDad over to him entirely about a year ago. Since then he’s recruited a team of volunteers who grown the traffic ten-fold, to a million page views a month.

So here’s the calculus:

• Wired.com makes good money selling ads on GeekDad (it’s very popular with advertisers)
• Ken gets a nominal retainer, but has also managed to parlay GeekDad into a book deal and a lifelong dream of being a writer
• The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they’ll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.

So that’s the difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write”. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).

It works great for all involved. Is it the model for the newspaper industry? Maybe not all of it, but it is the only way I can think of to scale the economics of media down to the hyperlocal level. And I can imagine far more subjects that are better handled by well-coordinated amateurs than those that can support professional journalists. My business card says “Editor in Chief”, but if one of my children follows in my footsteps, I suspect their business card will say “Community Manager.” Both can be good careers.

Malcolm, does this answer your question?

[Image at top from The New Yorker. Photo of Ken Denmead from GeekDad.]

Colligo Networks has long built some of the most best-known desktop applications for Microsoft SharePoint. The Colligo Contributor software suite lends offline access and an interface that’s definitely easier to handle.

But with the 4.0 release of Contributor scheduled to ship on July 13th, they’ve expanded the suite’s capabilities with a pair of tools that touch the core of SharePoint’s capabilities: a new file manager and an uploader for Outlook. Other features incorporated in to 4.0 include an enhanced SDK, one-click attachments, and drag-and-drop control of folders.

While the additions to Colligo Contributor may not exactly be on the bleeding edge of enterprise software, they’re something that’s likely to be fairly indispensable for the legion of organizations still tied to SharePoint.

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Making the Desktop a SharePoint Repository

The first big addition to Contributor 4.0 is File Manager. The new software is an extension to Windows Explorer that allows users to integrate files within their systems with SharePoint document libraries, essentially making any document on the desktop accessible from the platform at will. In other words, by letting you add offline files to your SharePoint instance, Colligo eliminates the need for traditional network file shares.

Reducing Email Pains

Uploader for Outlook tackles a thorn in the side of any enterprise customer: email attachments. What it does is to take the files you’d normally just attach in Outlook, and move them to SharePoint for you to link to, rather than weigh down your Exchange server and flood your inbox.

Folder Drag-and-Drop

The last feature of note to be incorporated in to 4.0 is the ability to control folders through drag and drop. While this is not new to other desktop SharePoint clients, like Bamboo’s Desktop Explorer and Neoxen’s Visual Modus, it’s still a welcome addition to Colligo Contributor. Easy reorganization of your taxonomy of folders is something that SharePoint sorely lacks out of the box.

Discuss

What do supermodel Veronica Webb, hip hop producer Jay-Z and Jajah co-founder Roman Scharf all have in common? Besides wealth and celebrity, they’re all connected to tomorrow’s launch of Talenthouse entertainment network. The site promises to be a space where creators in film, fashion, visual art, music and photography showcase their work for collaboration and discovery. Scharf is Talenthouse’s CEO, while Jay-Z and Webb have agreed to invite community members to contribute to upcoming projects.

According to the release, Talenthouse “empowers all artists to create original content, collaborate with each other and become recognized by a global audience.” I know what you’re thinking. Apart from the flashy graphics and Bono voice over, how is this different from YouTube?

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In addition to its sole focus on the arts, Talenthouse incorporates “Creative Invites” – a system where artists like Jay-Z and the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra invite community members to collaborate on music composition, video mash ups and even logos. While PR messaging touts that the site allows “revenue share to enable artists financial accomplishment”, it appears that for now, revenue share is negotiated between artists on their collaborations. At this point, the company does not intervene with artist payment, nor do they plan to pay artists revenue share on advertising. Regular banner or text-based advertising actually isn’t mentioned as a revenue model. Talenthouse does plan to offer premium artist services, branded contests and paid services for production companies, talent scouts and ad agencies.

While the site is certainly poised to gain buzz with its all-star cast of endorsers, at this point it’s too soon to say if amateur artists will see benefits from this service beyond those they’ve seen with YouTube and other sites.

Music is one area where it will be tough to beat existing services. Recently we’ve seen Malaysian-born YouTube star Zee Avi sign a deal with Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Records. Panic at the Disco and geek crooner Jonathan Coulton found their success using a combination of tools including MySpace, YouTube, BandCamp and Pure Volume. Meanwhile, for the collaboration function, Mix Match Music might be a better option as music stems and mash up mixes are priced upon upload and there is no need to negotiate financial details.

Talenthouse’s success will depend not on the technology it offers, but rather the community it draws. If Jay-Z can pack a site like he packs a concert, then musicians might be smart to try it out.

Discuss

Chances are you wouldn’t tell grandma about the wild party you went to last Saturday night. Likewise, you might have spent Sunday evening at home knittin’ a mitten and only feel secure enough in your manhood to share pictures of your fiber craft with family. While real life communication lets us share different things with different people, online social networking has tended to have two modes: public or private.

Last week, Facebook announced a move to support a much more sophisticated understanding of privacy that’s more like what real people have in real life. It’s a major shift in how Facebook works. We think the initial reporting on the news missed the point (ours certainly did) and the new privacy features are poorly implemented so far – but the changes being made on Facebook are important.

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When Facebook announced last week that users will now have a new set of privacy options for sharing content, we got the story wrong. We thought everyone’s shared items were going to be changed to public by default, but Facebook HQ emailed to tell us that only people with public profiles would see that happen. Those are the only people to see the new interface so far. Users whose privacy settings are set to friends only will maintain that as their default setting in the future, the company says.

We think most other reports on the news missed a key point, too, though. Everyone focused on the new option for shared messages to be publicly visible outside the constraints of a Facebook user’s friends network – people called it a shot at the wide open paradigm of Twitter. In fact, the biggest change may be that sharing options are becoming much more granular – more human.

A Different Understanding of Privacy

How can anything shared on the internet be considered private? University of Massachusetts-Amherst Legal Studies student Chris Peterson tackles the contemporary reality of privacy on Facebook in a very readable new draft thesis paper titled Saving Face: The Privacy Architecture of Facebook (PDF).

Peterson argues that the idea that anything published ought to be understood as intended for public distribution is an antiquated understanding from the era when publishing was expensive and required a lot of effort. The opposite is true today. Likewise, Peterson argues that the dominant legal framework today “recognizes as private only that which is completely secret.”

Instead, Peterson says that a more appropriate understanding of privacy today is based on context. We expect our communication to go on in an appropriate context (no drinking in church or praying in the bar) and we expect to understand how our communication will be distributed. If a college friend took photos of you drinking in a bar and showed them off to people in church, you might feel your privacy has been violated in both appropriateness and distribution. The bar is a public place, though, and not completely secret. Thus the need for a more sophisticated understanding of privacy that is more than mere secrecy.

Privacy on Facebook

Facebook to date has not supported such a sophisticated understanding. It has prided itself in talking about privacy and limiting visibility of user messages to a user’s friends. Are all your friends in one big bucket, though, in real life? Now that grandma, the boss, younger siblings, clergy, cops, creeps and others are all on Facebook – the only safe way to communicate in this all-or-nothing privacy environment is to be very bland and only share things that will be appropriate for everyone.

“…the privacy architecture of Facebook destroys contextual integrity, because almost every aspect of its design directly conflicts with norms of distribution.” Peterson writes. “The way information flows through Facebook is nothing at all like the way information flows through the corporeal world. It is an ‘environment that is fundamentally unnatural, in conflict with the one we evolved to live in.’ This tension between individual and environment causes the most common privacy problems experienced by members of Facebook…Facebook is a ‘system that communicates everything to everyone at the same time’ and in the same space.”

Now: The New Privacy on Facebook

Perhaps no longer! The new Facebook publishing feature lets users share things with just a particular list of their friends. (Or with the public at large if they so choose.) The contexts are un-collapsed. Communication is human again. That’s a very big deal and is the kind of change that could make far more people comfortable sharing far more information about their lives on Facebook. It’s also a feature that no major competitor (namely Twitter) offers.

Facebook may be solving one of the biggest problems in social networking – the unnaturally uncontrollable nature of communication. This new feature is clearly still in its infancy; even users who are able to control who sees their messages can’t control visibility of other actions, like joining groups. Mobile clients remain dumb “all or nothing” publishing tools when it comes to privacy.

We still stand behind what we have said in our previous coverage of Facebook and privacy – that the walled-garden approach of the site represents a huge loss of opportunity in innovation in tracking public sentiment and data mining. Looking elsewhere for now, though, it’s very interesting to note positive developments towards a more sophisticated privacy policy.

Once this feature is rolled out to all Facebook users, we expect that group creation and curation will become more common activities and we also expect that net effect on public messaging will be a big increase. There may be something in it for everyone, privacy minded people, people who want to discuss things in appropriate contexts and conversation scientists wanting more public messaging to analyze.

Too Bad It’s So Confusing

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to manage the new privacy settings as they are currently constituted. Several members of our staff struggled to make changes to message-specific and default privacy settings really stick. The feature is confusing if not outright broken. A lot of messages intended for limited distribution are going to be sent out wider than the author intended. That’s not good.

Ultimately some more clarity around just what Facebook wants to do with privacy would be really helpful. The company tends to talk in very simple terms to its users but has recently hired professional lobbyists in both the US and Europe to advance its privacy agenda. But what is that agenda?

From the UK Guardian last week:

According to Chris Kelly, the Californian web company’s chief privacy officer, the five-year-old startup has been engaging in talks with government officials in various countries for some time, but its growing size and importance means it is essential they “understand our philosophy”.

He said: “There is a concern we’ve had for some time that – in a well-meaning attempt to protect consumers – legislators or regulators would end up passing laws that would keep people from the beneficial sharing of information.”

We emailed Facebook last week to ask “what is that philosophy?” and the usually responsive communications team there has sent no reply. Update:
Facebook has replied and we’ll be interviewing Chris Kelly as soon as possible in our ongoing coverage of these issues. The company’s privacy policy is readily available but that doesn’t speak to some of the most important nuances when it comes to a new form of communication for hundreds of millions of people.

This newest change in the privacy options for sharing content on Facebook represents a major change to the nature of communicating on the site. If it’s implemented well it could make a dramatic difference in the way people use the site. Given the change underway and the company’s move to lobby governments around the world in favor of its privacy philosophy, we think it would be a good idea to have a more thorough public conversation about what that philosophy is.

Discuss

Aviary, which is known for its fully featured, browser-based image creation and manipulation tools, just released a new tool that makes it extremely easy to capture a copy of any web page by just adding ‘aviary.com/’ in front of a URL. Unlike most screen capture tools, Aviary is able to capture a complete web site, even if it extends beyond the borders of your screen. Aviary already offered a Firefox plugin, Talon, which allows users to create screenshots, but this new method is available from any browser, as long as it supports Flash for the image editing portion of Aviary.

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Easy to Use

For more control over the screenshot, you can also invoke Talon from Aviary’s web site, where you can manipulate the image quality, set the screen resolution, and decide if you want to capture the entire page or just the part that would be above the fold. In the next version, users will also be able to set which browser and OS to take the screenshot from (which should be great for web designers who want to test their creations).

Some Issues

One problem with the Firefox plugin, however, is that it doesn’t capture Flash content, and that, of course, is a deal-breaker in many cases. Using the ‘aviary.com’ prefix to capture Flash content works, but you can’t select a specific moment in a video to show in your screenshot, for example. For this, you still need desktop based tools like Jing or Skitch, which a lot of us here at RWW use. Though they can’t capture a complete web page that goes beyond the fold, you can use another desktop tool like Little Snapper, which makes it pretty easy to capture complete web pages at once.

Discuss

This morning, Google’s YouTube opened up its Reporters’ Center – a new hub for teaching citizen journalists to become better reporters by teaching them about how to prepare for interviews, be better investigative reporters, and how to help media organizations in the news-gathering process. Interestingly, at the same time as YouTube is trying to help citizen journalists, Google is also encouraging professional media organizations to join the YouTube Partner Program and upload more videos to YouTube that can then be featured on Google News.

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Google argues that by joining this program, news organizations will be able to reach a wider audience, cut hosting costs, and be able to interact with YouTube’s large (and often highly vocal) user base.

Playing Both Sides

It is interesting to see how Google and YouTube are courting both ‘amateur’ reporters (in the best sense of the word) and large media organizations at the same time. Google is clearly looking to strengthen YouTube’s position as a hub for news content – and given how the news market is in flux today, it is smartly trying to encourage both pros and citizen journalists to use its site as their default repository for their video content. The core reason for Google to encourage citizen journalists to shoot better and more compelling video, and for courting bigger media organizations, however, is that it is simply easier to sell advertising against professionally produced content.

Of course, as PaidContent pointed out earlier this morning, news organizations and Google News don’t exactly have the most friendly relationship. Now that Google News features YouTube videos more prominently on the site, news organizations could potentially profit from this arrangement even though many larger organizations already use white-label video services and sell their own ads against their video content.

Good Content

Looking at the Reporters’ Center, by the way, it is nice to see that the quality of the content there is generally very high, and any aspiring journalist can learn quite a lot from the videos that are currently posted on the site.

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Google today announced a number of SMS-based services for the African market. Google SMS provides access to information by SMS (news, local weather, sports, agriculture tips, etc.), while Google Trader is an SMS-based marketplace where buyers and sellers can connect. Google SMS Tips is a query-and-answer service that can take any free-form text query, find the keywords, and then identify and return a relevant answer from a large database.

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As Google points out, Africa has the world’s highest mobile growth rate and mobile phone penetration is far higher than Internet penetration. By focusing on SMS-based service, Google will be able to reach a far larger number of potential users than by working on web-based apps.

Just for Uganda at First

Even though Google stresses that it targets ‘Africa’ with these services, in reality, they are only available for users on MTN Uganda‘s network, but chances are that, if successful, Google will expand these offerings in the future.

Google worked together with MTN Uganda, the Grameen Foundation‘s “AppLab,” and a number of other local partners to get this service off the ground.

Fighting Information Poverty

In a post on the Google Africa blog about this launch, Rachel Payne, Google’s Country Manager in Uganda points out that the company believes that “it’s important to reach users wherever they are, with the information they need most, and in areas with the greatest information poverty.” It will be interesting to see how (and if) local users will make use of these new services.

SMS Tips

Among these new services, Google SMS and Google Trader are very interesting and will definitely be quite useful for a lot of users. Google SMS Tips seems to be the most sophisticated of these services, as it interprets search queries and doesn’t just return a list of links, but actually tries to compute the query and return a relevant answer to a question. For now, SMS Tips works best with health questions and queries related to farming (including weather information). Even if you are not in Uganda, you can give the service a try here (query form is at the bottom of the page)

Discuss

Last month, we posed the question “are trolls ruining social media?” – a topic that seems to have reared its ugly head once again over the weekend, this time with a specific focus on FriendFeed and the supposed angry mobs that form there. But let’s get real for a minute. Although it’s shocking that some FriendFeed users post terrible, hurtful things while using their real names, posting angry and mean comments is nothing new to the internet. Other social communities, including Digg and YouTube, also deal with this issue – heck, they’re even known for it!

But instead of continually pointing out the problem, maybe it’s time for the innovators in our community to start thinking up solutions. Here’s one we just thought up…let us know what you think.

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Being Hateful, But Not Anonymously?

The pseudo-anonymity of the internet – or at the very least, the ability to write something cruel without having to face the person eye-to-eye – often leads people to express themselves in ways that are far from how they would behave in real life. In the past, this typically led people to hide behind pseudonyms and screen names so they could post whatever they wanted without fear of repercussions.

That’s why I recently proposed that some communities put an end to online anonymity, thinking that if you removed the masks from people’s identities, they would start behaving properly. Of course, this led to a lot of debate in the comments. Obviously, I never meant that anonymity needed to be banned from the internet entirely – the world isn’t ready for that! – but there are some places where it doesn’t serve much of a purpose. (Tech blogs, for instance.)

People still hated the idea.

As a blogger who writes every day using my real name, it’s hard to sympathize with the need to post tech blog comments anonymously. Everything a blogger writes, we’re held accountable for. Why shouldn’t other community contributors be treated the same?

But as it turns out, there was a huge flaw in my reasoning in that post. I focused on whether or not someone should use their real name when posting, but that’s not the issue at all. It’s not really anonymity that’s to blame for the troll-like behavior we’re seeing in online communities, it’s the lack of accountability.

That’s why (some) people seem comfortable posting mean-spirited comments on sites like FriendFeed using their real name and their real identities to do so. You see, when you post on FriendFeed, your comment quickly disappears into the site’s “real-time flow” of information. Someone watching the stream sees it only momentarily, before it’s replaced with others. Even within the “angry mob” threads themselves, a single comment easily gets lost among hundreds of others.

So although the comment is attached to a real name, it’s a single needle in a haystack of opinion. There’s no way to see, at-a-glance, what that person’s commenting history was like. Were they usually nice and this angry post was an exception? Or did they make a habit of trolling? There’s simply no way to know.

What’s the Solution?

We don’t have any answers yet, just ideas. But maybe it’s time that we started focusing on solutions instead of pointing the finger at the web services…as if somehow FriendFeed itself (or Digg or YouTube for that matter) are to blame for this shameful aspect of human behavior.

Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica proposes that FriendFeed implement threaded comments with the ability to rate comments up or down. While I agree that would be a good first step in helping the community moderate the vitriol, it certainly doesn’t stop hateful comments from occurring in the first place (just look at Digg!).

Perhaps what we need is a rating system for the personalities of community participants. Think of it like eBay’s “star” ratings, but instead of grading a seller on how quickly an order was shipped, etc., you’d rate each others’ contributions to a community.

Imagine how this could work on FriendFeed, for example. People could rate others’ comments and the aggregation of the communities’ ratings would give overall insight to that person’s personality. Was the comment insightful? Kind? Spammy? Mean? Were you helping a newbie feel included? Were you answering a question or participating in a poll? Do you tend to leave positive comments about X company while being negative about Y? The list could go on and on.

The system should also show not just how a single comment was rated, but what that person’s overall rating is along with a history of their contributions.

If participants knew that their every action, whether “anonymous” or not, was adding up to paint an overall picture of who they really were, would this be enough of an equivalent to the kind of accountability we have in real life? The sort of accountability where people are judged on their behavior over time, and not for a single uttered statement?

Rating systems are hardly a new idea – many online communities use badges and other methods for rewarding helpful participation. But rating systems that extend beyond simply rewarding good behavior to publicizing the bad, too, don’t really exist today…at least when it comes to comments and communities.

It’s hard to imagine exactly what a system like this would look like, but that’s where UI designers would need to flex their muscles and create something that didn’t take away from the overall experience while also encouraging people to rate comments both positive and negative, not just the ones they hated.

Is this a terrible idea? If so, we know you’ll set us straight. That is, after all, what the comments are for. But if you think it’s awful, at least be so kind as to suggest a better alternative.

Image credit: flickr user takingthemoney

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GridIron Software has finally brought Flow, its visual workflow manager, out of public beta.

This first stable version available for purchase ups the ante by allowing groups to collaborate on a workflow via the Share Maps feature, as well as adding direct access to Flow from within Adobe applications.

Flow was created with the help of visual designer Mark Coleran, who is known for his work on films such as The World Is Not Enough and the Bourne series. Though it’s aimed squarely at creative professionals, Flow is probably the most advanced workflow manager out there, and is well worth a closer look by almost anyone.

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During its public beta, Flow was already being hailed as a cutting edge way to organize workflows. On top of the slick interface for creating a workflow map, features such as automatic time tracking, visual search and versioning made it something of a designers dream.

But for managing the projects that actually used the workflow you just created, Flow was limited to purely individual use, since it had no robust method for sharing a workflow map among a team.

Enter “Share Maps“, the most expansive addition to Flow’s public debut. The new feature makes room for creating a workflow group that can all have access to the same map. In addition to enabling real collaborative workflow creation in Flow for the first time, Share Maps means project managers can now join in. That’s sure to make it something more friendly to enterprise use.

The next integration should place Flow one step closer to becoming an essential utility for designers during their work. An Adobe CS4 Flash Panel now included in the package allows users to access their workflow maps directly inside Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or Flash.

GridIron Flow can be bought through the site for $299 per single license or $399 for three. 1.0 also now supports both PCs and Macs, and there is a free trial as well for those who are still curious to give it spin.

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