Skip to main content

Tech roundup for non-geeks: Week One

I'm still looking for a good name for this collection of tech-ish stories of the week. The comments are open if you'd like to suggest a name.

This week:

Study looks at teens and why they quit using their Facebook account. The overwhelming number one reason? Not privacy or "old people", but just good ol' fashioned loss of interest. Go figure.

Online Photoshop-like tool Picnik is now integrated with Picasa as its online image editor. Picnik is a great, free alternative to Photoshop if you're just doing basic image editing.

It looks like Google may be offering the ability to be signed into multiple accounts at the same time. Now if they'd just allow you to completely merge two or more accounts...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Some scattered thoughts on the money of digital music

If you haven't already read Digital Audio Insider's interview with Camper Van Beethoven's Jonathan Segal ¹, it's a must read for anyone with even a slight interest in digital music and the money of the industry. Segal has tons of thoughts on just about every aspect of digital music, but best of all, he brings in these thoughts as someone whose initial music industry experience was in the days of purely-physical media, when "pirating" meant copying something onto a blank tape. My main takeway is general and obvious but an important reminder: we are in a transition time for music, and what it will become is anyone's guess. I think Segal's take on merchandise and live performances taking the place as artist's primary source of income as "asinine" is too harsh to be true, but I do think that we're in such a state of transition that any shot at predicting artistic income in the future is completely in the dark. Such predictions are really ...

Why Google+'s Circles doesn't fix anything

One of the biggest advantages of social media-style communication is the ability for your audience to choose itself rather than for you to assume interests and choose the audience yourself, likely leaving out people that would be interested. Anyone who's started a blog knows the surprise in finding that the people who read it religiously are the people you never would have thought would be interested, while many of those people that you thought would read every word never look at it. Likewise with Facebook, where many of the people I interact with are old friends from the past who have turned out to be surprisingly funny and interesting, whereas closer friends are never to be heard from. The flip side of this is email, where every "To" box requires you to decide who your audience is. That's all fine and well when you just need to get through to one person, but when sending information to larger groups, how do you know you're not leaving out the people who...