Tag: mobile

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I use navigation on my Android phone to pick out the best route to work each morning. The problem is, it bases time estimates on traffic conditions now — not traffic conditions as they’ll be when I get to each point along the route. I’ve gotten used to the morning drive taking at least 15 minutes* longer and the evening drive taking around 10 minutes less than predicted, but a little more precision would be helpful.

Obviously, Google isn’t psychic. They can’t predict where and when car crashes will happen. But they do have historical traffic data. If you go to Google Maps on the web and display traffic, you can switch between live data and an average for a given time and day of the week.

It would be fantastic if Google used that data to predict how much slower (or faster) traffic will be moving at each point along each projected route, and use that for the time estimates. It would be nice for the “Are we there yet?” factor, but it would be incredibly useful for route planning!

*Sometimes more. This morning, it predicted a 55-minute trip. It took me an hour and 35 minutes.

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So, Twitter blocked access from Twidroyd and UberTwitter today, citing acceptable use policy violations, then classily pushing their own apps. IMO this would be similar to Google blocking Internet Explorer or Firefox from accessing their services, then telling people “oh, you can use Chrome.”

UberMedia has made some changes to appease the Twitter TOS guardians, and expects to be un-blocked soon.

Anyway, onto the accusations:

These violations include, but arenā€™t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of usersā€™ Tweets in order to make money.

This is the most I’ve been able to find. Let’s break it down:

a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters

“Privacy issue” is a pretty strong accusation (not that it seems to have actually hurt Facebook).

Here’s a thought: Twidroyd has built-in support for TwitLonger, which will let you route a longer message through a third-party service and then post it as a shorter tweet with a link to the full message.

My guess: this was enabled for all outgoing messages instead of just public tweets, including direct messages. This would make the message (a) visible to Twitlonger itself, and (b) potentially visible to anyone who obtained the URL to that message.

trademark infringement

According to UberMedia, they’ve been working on a name change for UberTwitter for the past three weeks. If that’s the case, it sounds like Twitter is just padding the accusations.

changing the content of usersā€™ Tweets in order to make money

This is a serious accusation, if true. The whole purpose of a communication platform is for one person to convey a message to another person. If that message is altered in transit, it undermines the whole purpose.

But here’s the question: What do they mean by content? Do they mean the exact characters typed in? Do they mean the words? If Twidroyd shortens a URL so that it fits in 140 characters, does that count as changing the content? How about that twitlonger support?

If Twidroyd or UberTwitter prefers a particular URL shortener in exchange for money (just as desktop web browsers prefer a particular search engine), does that count as “changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money?”

Isn’t that essentially what Twitter plans to do by forcing all URLs (even those already shortened) through its t.co URL shortener in order to collect data which it can then…*gasp*…monetize?

Edit: And just as I finish the post, I find a post explaining exactly what the issues were. I was right about the privacy issue, though it was with tmi.me, not twitlonger.

As for changing content, the claim was that UberCurrent (the third app whose name I kept forgetting) was changing affiliate links to point to their own affiliate links instead of the author’s. UberMedia says that they “donā€™t currently do this,” implying that they may have at some time in the past, or may have been considering it. In any case, that’s a jerky thing to do, if not quite as severe as altering the meaning of a message. I remember a Firefox extension that would let you raise funds for an organization by changing Amazon links to use their affiliate links (eventually discontinued due to Amazon TOS violation), but I think even that made a point of not altering existing affiliate links.

Anyway, It’s a good thing they’re using the Android and Blackberry markets. I expect I’ll see an updated Twidroyd later today (or whenever it is that the phone checks for new apps). From what I’ve heard about the iPhone iOs App Store, it could take as much as a week to get the fixed version approved and out in the hands of its users.

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I’ve never been a fan of actually using GPS navigation. Sure, I’ve always thought it was insanely cool that it was possible, I just didn’t want to use it myself. For unfamiliar destinations I generally prefer researching a route first, and for familiar ones I generally prefer just relying on my local knowledge. But I’ve found something that I do like using it for: Traffic.

I recently started a new job, exchanging a fairly short commute for a ~40-mile trek across the Los Angeles freeway system. Under ideal conditions, it’s about 45 minutes. When the freeways are bogged down (i.e. when I’m actually going to be driving), it can take an hour and a half or more.

When I landed the job, I replaced my phone with a G2. It’s a heck of a lot faster than my old phone, plus it can handle newer software…like Google’s turn-by-turn navigation app for Android. After trying a couple of different routes the first few days, I tried it out…and discovered that it factors in live traffic data when calculating the remaining time.

The upshot: I can walk out the door, start up the app, and figure out which of three main routes will get me there fastest. (Well, least slowly, anyway.)

Of course, it’s not perfect. It’s based on traffic now, and over the course of a predicted hour-plus, the route could easily get more congested. That’s not even counting potential accidents. It does seem to update frequently, though, and knowing I’ve avoided a 100-minute drive in favor of 70 minutes really outweighs the annoyance of a mechanical voice telling me how to get to the freeway from home.

I do have to remember not to rely on it too heavily at the end of the trip, though. I left it on by mistake after selecting my route to the LA Convention Center for Adobe MAX this morning, and instead of turning it off, I let it direct me straight past the parking garage.

Oops.

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Crispian Jago presents the history of science as a subway map (cool visualization).

The comic strip The Oatmeal tackles the irony of mobile app pricing. Or, in the worlds of “Weird Al” Yankovic: “I hate to waste a buck ninety-nine.”

A 19th-century terraforming experiment: Ascension Island’s artificial ecosystem, instigated by Charles Darwin.

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Portable cellular phone tower on wheels.As near as I can tell, there were two main wifi networks at the San Diego convention center this year: ā€œComic-Con 2010ā€ was open and free…and bogged down. It was enough to post snippets of text one line at a time, but it took forever to start the console for Cover it Live, though, and it wasn’t worth it for uploading photos.

AT&T also had a wireless network, but it required you to either be a customer already or buy access. One of the perks of U-Verse service: free access to AT&T wifi hotspots! Since only paid customers were using it, it was a lot faster. Faster even than our home internet access, in fact.

This was in the lobby, hallways and meeting rooms at the convention center itself. I never really tried to access wifi on the exhibit floor (who has room to sit down, other than people staffing a booth?), and didn’t spend much time on my phone either, except for sending and receiving text messages.

Over at the Hilton, however, access was virtually nonexistent: No wifi as near as I could tell, and even phone access was spotty. I saw people texting in the Indigo Ballroom, but the ones nearby were all on iPhones (AT&T) or Verizon. I had absolutely no T-Mobile signal in that hotel, even though it was perfectly fine everywhere else. Katie had the same problem at Indigo last year, and we were hoping it might have improved. No dice.**

One reason I didn’t worry too much about having constant net access: I spent way too much time last year online. Liveblogging aside, this year I wanted to focus more on actually being there. Last year I posted about 30 messages a day to Twitter. This year it was closer to 10 posts total.

So of course, now I’m spending lots of time after we get back writing things up…online.

*Yes, I know the photo is of a cell phone tower, not a wifi hotspot, but I didn’t take any pictures of wifi routers and this is the next best thing.

**Actually, there was a whole booth full of dice, but it was over on the main floor.

»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.