Future Vision

Facebook now at Windows Mobile

Back in March, Microsoft promised the world, and especially Windows Mobile 6 owners, a native Facebook application for Windows Mobile phones. On Thursday, Redmond delivered. OK, so Facebook for Windows Mobile 6 was forecast for April instead of May, but we're willing to overlook its tardiness because the app not only works quite well, but it also adds some unique and useful functionality tailored to this platform.

It's striking that Facebook on Windows Mobile is recognizable, but doesn't look like the spitting image of the site, unlike Facebook on BlackBerry, Palm, and iPhone, which retain the site's very strong look and feel. That said, it matters little. The core features are there--the news feed, status, and photo updates, notifications, and friend requests. Also your personal wall, info, and photos, your friends list, and so on.

It's noteworthy that the phone's form factor may affect how you navigate. On the tall, thin Samsung Omnia, flipping the screen horizontally showed the full width of the app, but not the depth. The vertical view condenses the navigation icons up top, but truncates the secondary navigation bar just below, so you'll need to scroll to the right to see the photo tab, for instance.

Here's one example that it's not Facebook as usual on these phones. Instead of following a link to update your status within the app window, you either press a soft key (from your profile page) or a menu item (from the Status Updates screen) to tell your circle what you're up to.

Facebook for Windows Mobile also includes a few mobile-only features that make use of the operating system's characteristics. As with Facebook on other mobile platforms, you're able to upload a photo from your album, or take a new one. You'll be able to do the same for video, assuming your phone has that capability. In addition, the app uses the Windows Mobile menu metaphor that pops up activities when you tap your finger or stylus to the touch screen. For instance, tapping a friend's status message produces a list of three options: view their profile, write on the wall, or leave a comment.

The best and most original new feature is the phone book, which neatly gathers the names and numbers of buddies who have populated their profiles with their digits. With this list, you can call, text, or send a message to their Facebook in-box. (Note: Texting didn't work with my Omnia during testing, but did work with a Windows Mobile 6 Palm Treo Pro.)

Somewhat similar address book tie-ins have been very recently implemented on Facebook for BlackBerry, but the goal was more to port Facebook photos to the address book and give users a quick way to start writing to a Facebook contact, rather than to give social networkers quick access to a secondary address book. I, for one, hadn't realized I had so many of my contacts' phone numbers at my fingertips. Now if only Microsoft or RIM could mash up their ideas to create a new record in the native address book for these Facebook contacts, and pull in their photos in the process.

A secret address book awaits. Call, text, or send a Facebook message.
Once again, it's interesting to note Facebook's strategy of collaborating with developers from Microsoft, as they have done with those at RIM, Palm, and others, to let the platform-providers roll out these apps themselves on the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Palm. It makes sense--Facebook's team is relatively small, but demand for Facebook is globally high. Rather than wrestle with programming for separate platforms, Facebook can get Palm's engineering corps to work with Facebook, using APIs or other tools in the development arsenal.

As a result, these multiple versions of Facebook vary in their ancillary feature sets, but keep the marrow of the app the same--feeds, photos, and so on. The design of Microsoft's Facebook app isn't nearly as crisp or beguiling as is the iPhone's, for example, and it could use some work making tasks like searching for names from within the phone book much smoother. However, Microsoft rose to the occasion with the substance of this app, and the effort shows.

Online Publishers got another way to make money

Newspaper and content providers on the Internet are getting increasingly antsy about how to make money. Kachingle announced its solution in February, and it has gained so much interest, the founders say, that the launch is being delayed while the team builds out the service so it can support what they think will be a popular offering.

Here's the basic idea of Kachingle: Users contribute a small amount, currently $5.00 per month, voluntarily. On registration, they indicate which content sites they like and want to support. At the end of the month, their monthly fee is distributed to their sites, based on how much time they spent on each site.

Founder Cynthia Typaldos created the idea five years ago, but says it was too early. "Content providers weren't desperate enough," she says. They are now, but Kachingle isn't yet ready. It should launch in July. At the moment, some parts of the original product don't scale, Typaldos says.

Kachingle has had over 250 unsolicited inquires to use its service, of which 75 percent are from the U.S. and Canada, and 25 percent from the rest of the world, according to Typaldos. So far 80 percent of the queries are from bloggers and 20 percent from other content sites like newspapers, some of which have multiple sites and millions of users.

You won't boost your salary with these 5 IT skills

Technical skills may never die, but areas of expertise wane in importance as technology advances, forcing companies to evolve and IT staff to forsake yesterday's crafts in favour of tomorrow's must-have talents.

"There is less need for system-side knowledge. In the past, IT folks had to understand a lot about memory, drivers and address locations, and what used which interrupt, but nowadays that stuff is plug-and-chug even on many Unix systems," says Brian Jones, manager of network engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's Tech Communications Network Services unit. "I feel like all the skills I have picked up along the way are valuable and help shape my thinking and troubleshooting abilities. I don't know how to value or devalue these skills; it's like they have taken on new value now."

Industry watchers would be hard pressed to name specific IT skills as entirely dead or completely useless, but some skills are well on their way to being considered a thing of the past -- as reflected by the declining pay associated with them. As hot skills like virtualisation rise to the top of company must-have lists, high-tech talents in certain operating systems and specific vendor products fall to the bottom. Here are five high-tech skills that don't demand the pay they once did.

Plain old HTML

As companies embrace Web 2.0 technologies such AJAX, demand for skills in HTML programming are taking a back seat. According to Foote Partners, pay for skills in technologies such as Ajax and XML increased by 12.5 percent in the last six months of 2008, while IT managers say they don't see a demand for technology predecessors such as HTML. "I'm not seeing requirements for general Web 1.0 skills -- HTML programming skills," says Debbie Joy, a lead solution architect for CSC.

Legacy programming languages

Skills in programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran, PowerBuilder and more don't rate like they once did.

"Certainly the Cobol people that had a resurgence with the Y2K bug aren't in demand," says John Estes, vice president of strategic alliances of Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing consultancy. "Certain other applications such as Delphi and PowerBuilder, [which were] very big in the '90s, are no longer in demand."

IT work-force and compensation research conducted by Foote Partners revealed that Cobol, PowerBuilder and Jini noncertified skills were among the lowest-paying skills in the second half of 2008. David Foote, CEO and chief research officer at Foote Partners, says the research shows not that such skills aren't in use today but that companies aren't willing to pay for them. "There is still a lot of C and Cobol around, though these skills are worth very little paywise," Foote says.

NetWare

Operating system know-how continues to be in top demand among hiring managers, but expertise in Novell's network operating system NetWare isn't keeping up with other technologies in the same area. "Networking software such as NetWare isn't near what it was in the '90s," Estes says. And Foote adds, "Windows Server and Linux skills have replaced, or are replacing, NetWare skills" in terms of demand.

Non-IP network

IP and Internet skills usurped non-IP network expertise and know-how in technologies such as IBM's System Network Architecture (SNA) continue to rank among the lowest-paying skills. "For networking, IP skills have replaced SNA skills," Foote says. According to Foote Partners' research, SNA skills accounted for just 2 percent of base pay in the fourth quarter of 2007, while security skills made up 17 percent of base pay.

"Mainframe computing skills, including network components such as SNA, are no longer required in a server-based IP networking environment," says Martin Webb, manager of data network operations at the Ministry of Labour and Citizens' Services in British Columbia.

PC tech support

The US Computer Technology Trade Association (CompTIA) reports that hardware skills and knowledge, including expertise with printers and PCs, are on the decline in terms of demand. CompTIA surveyed 3,578 IT hiring managers to learn which skills would grow in importance over time and the industry organisation found: "The skill area expected to decline the most in importance is hardware."

Foote Partners research separately showed an 11.1 percent decline in pay over the last six months of 2007 for ITIL skills, which are often put in place to streamline IT service management and help desk efforts.

"The 'move, add and changes' PC tech function isn't quite what is used to be," Robert Half Technology's Estes says.

Western Digital's WD TV gets a firmware update

If you are an owner of a WD TV (and I really believe you should be one if you already have an LCD or Plasma TV), I have some good news.

Western Digital just released Friday an update for the device's firmware, to version 1.02.07. The main improvement in this the addition of built-in codecs and better audio support for the .MKV file. This is the file format that's popularly used to store compressed Hi-Def content such as that of a Blu-ray movies, much similar to the DivX format that's used to store compressed DVD movies.

The WD TV is the only computer-agnostic player I know that supports well the .MKV file format. You can view the complete list of improvement in this firmware here (pdf file).

The update process is simple, you just download the update provided in zip file, decompress it and put the firmware file onto a USB external hard drive. Plug the drive into to the WD TV, turn it on then use the remote control to navigate to the "Settings" section of the device. The rest is self-explanatory.

The new version 1.02.07 firmware update of the WD TV can be downloaded for free here.

Twitter's Experts don't know how the site will do from now on

The social media website Twitter has, over its years of existence, gathered a huge following, and, more recently, a number of celebrities including politicians, TV presenters and music/movie stars as well. What originally started as a project built in two weeks, and then released to the public just to “see if they like it” became in little over 3 years a benchmark website on the Internet, on which even popular TV show hostess Oprah Winfred started making an appearance a few days ago. Politicians on the Capitol Hill also use the tool to stay connected with their voters, and some of them have a great number of followers on the micro-blogging service.

In a recent interview with Oprah, Twitter CEO Evan Williams asked the host to tweet live during the show. “It was a brilliant coup. A week ago I would ask my non-geek friends if they had ever heard of Twitter and they would say no. Today they know exactly what I am talking about and it's all down to Oprah,” Ann Handley, who is a representative of Marketing Profs, explained to the BBC. She herself has a Twitter following of more than 28,000 people. The move brought the once-thought-for-kids service into the homes of the average American.

As evidenced by statistics supplied by market tracker firm Hitwise, logins on Twitter increased 43 percent in the days after Oprah's show, which is again a testament to the power of television over the average man and woman. Internet experts say that the rise of Twitter, from a side project to a mainstream destination, is something so amazing, that, when reading the numbers, you'd think they are fake. The site grew several times over in just three years, clearly out-classing popular destinations such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.

“The messages would say things like 'away for coffee', 'not at my desk' and 'too busy to chat', which were not that interesting in and of themselves. The real trick was to look at all of these messages as a whole where they were kind of compelling and showed all these people out and about doing stuff,” said Biz Stone, the co-founder of the website. He added that the whole thing started when he looked at instant messenger status screens, and saw only plain sentences, with “no life” in them. “We literally built Twitter in two weeks and just put it out there to see if people liked it. If that early feedback hadn't been so supportive, I'm not sure we would have kept on the way we did.”

“Twitter has changed the way businesses market and communicate with customers. I am a Comcast customer and if I tweet about a problem, I will now get a response via Twitter. This is unprecedented in terms of the way companies have operated in the past. But there are still a lot of companies out there that are not sure how to leverage Twitter,” Ann Handley added.

“Twitter is a traditional dotcom company. They have a lot of visibility but they are not making any money. Until they start making money to pay the bills, their likelihood of surviving is relatively low. Oprah can't help you out if you are not making money. She rarely writes checks to support non-profitable companies,” Enderle Group Technology Analyst Rob Enderle summed up the problem for the BBC News.

Facebook users want changes!

Facebook users have voted to back changes which give them control over data and content they post on the site.Early results suggest 75% of those who voted support the proposals.The vote was triggered by changes Facebook made to its terms and conditions in February. The move drew fire because it appeared to hand the social network site ownership of images, videos and data that users posted on profile pages.

Low Turnout

In response to the criticism, Facebook withdrew the changed terms, wrote a new set and invited its 200 million members to make their views known.The new terms return control of what is done with data put on the site to users and give them the right to ask for it to be deleted if they stop using Facebook.

In total about 600,000 people took part in the week-long vote. Initially, Facebook said it would only adopt those new terms if 30% of its members voted in support of them.

However, writing in a blog posting on Facebook announcing the early results. You can expect to see the new documents on the site in the coming weeks.

Preliminary count suggested 74.4% backed the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.The results are now being assessed by an external auditor to produce a final count. There was not a bigger turnout but acknowledged that the exercise was a first for both Facebook and its members.