By DAVID LIAN
alltherage@thestar.com.my

I AM a sucker for shiny new social networks that require a special invitation to get in. So, when news of something called Pinterest started going around, I knew that I had to get on it.

Now, you’re probably thinking: “Ugh, not another social network!”. Well, you do have a point, as most people don’t need much more than a simple Facebook account to stay connected with friends and contacts. I do agree that social networking can be overwhelming sometimes.

But Pinterest … well Pinterest fills a more specific niche. Remember those cork pinboards at school or in the office where you put up notes and posters mostly to remind you of things? Think of Pinterest as the virtual version of that – instead of sticking up a piece of paper, you’re posting a link and picture to somewhere on the Internet.

You’re not limited to one board. Rather, you can have many boards, and many interests. For example, I have a pinboard for “Good books to read” where I pin the books I recommend reading or reviews of books that I agree with.

I also have another board called Warhammer 40,000 where I pin links to modelling and hobby projects for my miniature wargame, so I can get back to working on those when I’ve got more time.

If you’re my friend, you can follow one or all of my pinboards. For example, let’s say our common interest is in science fiction novels and I’ve created a pinboard called “Science Fiction”. You can now choose to only follow my pins on the Science Fiction board and ignore all the other stuff I post that don’t interest you.

On top of that, you can share ownership of your boards with friends, allowing everyone within the community to post links. I can already see how useful this can be for students completing group coursework together. Imagine that your assignment is to create a model volcano, and the task is for everyone in the group to research and share their findings. With Pinterest, you simply make a board and everyone can pin their findings there, giving access to everyone in the group to see it.

The rise of Pinterest brings to focus a new dimension of social networking that perhaps has been largely ignored, which is what some commentators are calling the “Interest Graph”. The term plays off Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Graph, which describes Facebook’s ability to link people with social connections together.

“Everybody knows somebody” and “six degrees of separation” was the mantra of the Social Graph.

The Interest Graph behaves entirely differently. Instead of organising people according to who you know, the Interest Graph organises people according to their similar interests. What happens is pure serendipity, especially when you have someone who shares the same interest as you discover something you like as well.

Love recipes? Follow people with pinboards for recipes. What about basketball? Start a “basketball” pinboard yourself. And instead of meeting people who just have a social connection to you, you’ll be meeting people who share the same interest and learning new stuff that’s interesting to you along the way.

There’s gravity in this movement as the Internet continues to evolve and shape itself around people. But more about the people you should know, than the people you already know.

The Internet allows people who’ve never met in real life to connect and share information, even though they are thousands of kilometres apart. The Interest graph takes this ideal on a totally different tangent, making meaningful connections easier.

Often, it surprises you with things you’d find useful but never search for. For example, a quick browse for me on the boards of other social media fanatics revealed some nice infographics I had never seen before.

If the current Internet is about “search”, and finding the things you like using search engines, with social networks like Pinterest and Facebook’s own “interest” initiatives, the future will be about recommendations and automatic links with things we like.

So give Pinterest a whirl. Who knows? You might just discover something you like.

* David Lian has a couple of Pinterest invites to give away. Tweet him at @davidlian.

By NIKI CHEONG

alltherage@thestar.com.my

In the mid-1990s, I created my first website. It was only a single page, though. Through some very easy online tutorials, I managed to teach myself basic Hypertext Markup Language or HTML, and could add text – in different sizes and colours – to the page.

Those old enough to remember the early days of the World Wide Web will also remember such free hosting sites as Geocities and Tripod. These sites made it easy for people to create websites, though you had the choice of including HTML codes to personalise your pages.

I had so much fun learning something new and that I could experiment with, I probably went overboard with my modifications.

Still, I managed to get skillful enough to “teach” fellow netizens who wanted to learn basic HTML through the various online communities on those sites.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that I essentially learned a new language – even though it wasn’t as conventional as say, learning French, Mandarin or even Sign.

Of course, technology has advanced so much since then that you arguably do not need to know HTML (we’re in version 5 of the language now, compared to v.1 when I first learned it).

Blogging sites such as Blogger and WordPress have made website creations as simple as typing some text in and clicking a few buttons. And if you wanted something more elaborate, you could use a software like Dreamweaver, which doesn’t require you to code either.

The advantage I had, as someone who was familiar with the basic language of the web, was that I could probably modify my Blogger and WordPress sites a bit better than the average layman. Still, languages evolve and digital languages are no different.

Besides newer versions, there are also other “languages” that can make things more sophisticated including CSS (cascading style sheets) and Javascript.

Last year, I had the opportunity to learn these new languages (and refresh my basic HTML knowledge) when I opted to study Web Technologies as a module
for my Master’s course. Since then, I have managed to maintain my blog and website better.

This year, I am auditing a class which teaches a different language – Python.
One of the reasons for this is not only to extend my understanding of computer coding (although these are probably entry level).

The other is that I made a New Year’s resolution similar to that of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s – to spend the year learning to code.

Bloomberg, myself and almost 400,000 other people around the world have taken the pledge as part of the “Code Year” campaign, organised by CodeAcademy (www.codeacademy.com).

The company sends an e-mail each Monday (we’re in week five at the moment so there’s still time to catch up if you wish) that contains some basic lessons and exercises on coding.

I would encourage you to do the same. Just in the few lessons I’ve had over the past few months, I now have a better understanding of why things work the way they do on the Internet and on my smartphones (apps need to be coded too).

Other than just having additional knowledge, it also allows us to manipulate such sites to function better and more relevant to our use.

It is also always useful to learn a new language, and considering how much technology looks set to be part of our lives in the future (if it hasn’t already), it would make sense that we equip ourselves with as much knowledge about these systems as possible.

In Britain, the education secretary Michael Gove has recently announced that starting September, schools will teach computer science and programming.

Not every body may want to be a computer programmer but there are other values to learning a different language – whether in just maintaining your personal sites, having an extra skill on your resume or getting a headstart in what might just become the major language of the future.

Most importantly, I think understanding the fundamentals of the technology that we have become so reliant on will also empower us as users.

It will give us more options in terms of usability. We will no longer need to be slaves to systems and programmes that have been so far forced upon us through lack of choice (and ignorance).

We will be able to do much more with open source software, and who knows, you might just be good enough to create your own applications that works for you.

So, try to spare some time once a week and take part in the Code Year tutorials (www.codeyear.com). It may be really basic lesson, but it’s a good start. And the truth is, you have very little to lose and all to gain.

Niki is a MA Digital Culture and Society student at King’s College London. Find him online at www.nikicheong.com or via Twitter at www.twitter.com/
nikicheong.

WITH no small amount of glee, I happily informed students who were late handing in their assignments that Wikipedia was going to be “blacked out” for a day.

That was last Wednesday, the day where Internet giants like Wikipedia, Google, Facebook and Reddit decided to “black out” their sites in protest against the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) bring tabled in the US.

Depending on the site, the “black out” meant different things. For Wikipedia, users browsing the English language website last Wednesday would find a message popping up instead, telling them to “imagine a world without free knowledge.”

Indeed, if you were a student looking for help on Wikipedia that very instant, you couldn’t do anything but experience what living without Wikipedia would be like.

Other sites, like Reddit, chose to “censor” every single line of content. You could see that content had been written and shared, but you couldn’t read what it was – no thanks to a thick black line running through the text.

Google adopted a safer approach, choosing to show US users only a blacked out Google Logo on its front page. I can only imagine the pandemonium that would ensue if Google were to go down.

So obviously, there was a big hoo-hah over the Internet about this piece of legislation called SOPA, and to a lesser extent, its cousin called the “Protect IP Act” (PIPA). And it grabbed the attention of the Internet audience. But, what exactly is this act about? And why should you and I care about it?

Let me do my best to break it down to you. SOPA is piece of US legislation that seeks to allow companies that think their stuff is being pirated to file a lawsuit against websites outside of the United States and force action that would stop those websites from being accessed by people in the US.

Confused? Here’s how it works: Say you’re a big Hollywood company and you’ve released your brand new blockbuster movie. But as you are sending the video files to the cinemas, you discover it’s already on some website called “ShareYourBigFiles.ru”.

Now, you think, “Oh no, if people are downloading the movie, I can’t get them to buy movie tickets from the cinema.” So you try to file a lawsuit.

Unfortunately, the website’s owners are based outside the US and the actual servers are also located in another country. This means you’ll need to go through the laws of their country – laws which may not take US copyright law quite as stringently – to bring them to court.

What can a company in these dire straits do? The supposed answer is SOPA, which would allow the company to file a lawsuit in US courts, and block the offending website from being accessed inside the US. They are not shutting down the website, but removing it from the screens of US citizens.

“Wait a minute,” you think, “that sounds reasonable.” Well, if you’ve been listening to the big media company’s side of the story, you might feel that way too. But here’s why technology companies such as Google and Facebook and Wikipedia have been rallying supporters to object to SOPA.

Buried deep in SOPA’s legislation, is this phrase: “A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order…Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within five days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.”

What this means is that through SOPA, a media company can essentially tell an Internet Service Provider to censor a website by going to court and obtaining a court order. And by pursuing a case as stringently as possible, it can essentially erase a website from the face of the American Internet. Now, if the US sets this precedent, which nations do you think will soon follow suit?

The part that’s dangerous about this is that it starts to make the Internet Service Provider responsible for policing content. In Malaysia, we’re fortunate to have the Bill of Guarantee under the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) to ensure the Internet shall remain uncensored. It’s a benefit we should really be thankful for.

Imagine if TMNet now is responsible for blocking sites like YouTube simply because someone posted “pirated” content? Or if DropBox needed to cease its service because some pirated files were found on someone’s account? The thought is ludicrous, but it’s something that Sopa’s shown us we’re taking for granted.

The Internet as we experience it today is free and fluid. You can go online and start a blog and post your own opinions. You can use Facebook to easily connect with friends, and share media. Even the much-maligned Bit-Torrent technology is used to deliver useful information faster (it’s not all about piracy). On the Malaysian front, Information, Communications and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Rais Yatim has said last year that the country is committed to keeping the Internet free.

The proponents for a free Internet are against SOPA not because it’s not reasonable to want to protect your ideas and original work, but because of its deeper ramifications, chiefly taking us down that slippery slope of Internet censorship. Some 4.5 million people signed a pledge last Wednesday to oppose Sopa and any form of legislation that could lead to Internet censorship. Wikipedia’s message calls SOPA a “legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet.”

For the rest of us, we really need to ask ourselves: “So, how much would you like your Internet to remain free and open?”

Appreciate the freedom you have today. Oh, and appreciate Wikipedia too. Let’s hope the Internet never black out again.

* David Lian has tried using the Internet in China where censorship is heavy (you can’t even get to Facebook) and it’s really not fun. Tweet him at @davidlian.

JUST last week, Vinton Cerf got the interwebs abuzz with his article in the New York Times titled “The Internet is not a human right”.

Besides the sensational headline, the article was also fascinating because Cerf is one of the original architects of the Internet, back when it was used by only the military.

I’m not sure of his intentions for writing the article, but one could argue that a couple of things that happened in 2011 led to it.

The first is of course the massive protests that happened around the world – from the “revolutions” in the Middle East and North Africa to the Occupy movement.

Journalists, academics and the layman have spent the past 12 months debating the role the Internet, and social media specifically, played in the movement.

The digital determinist among us are more than happy to give social media all the credit. After all, there is no doubt that we are on the edge of a communication revolution and even after these few years, it still remains a buzzword.

Then there are the opponents to this idea, like writer Malcolm Gladwell who wrote, “The revolution will not be tweeted”. Those who share his sentiment claim that social media did not cause the revolutions, but instead only served as an enabler.

The arguments had escalated to the point where, as Cerf noted in his article, there are suggestion that the Internet should be a human right.

“The issue is particularly acute in countries whose governments clamped down on Internet access in an attempt to quell the protesters,” he wrote.

It was at this juncture, however, that Cerf  made his point – “technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself”.

In my opinion, he is absolutely right (no pun intended). My view is that technology affords communication and the dissemination of information, which in turn affords access to information, freedom of speech and education.

These three things, among others, are what I would consider human rights. If technology was to be a right in itself, then one could easily argue – within the same context – that radio frequency, telecommunication waves and satellite signals are human rights too.

The second thing is the introduction of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States.

According to popular technology site CNet, if passed, the act will allow “the US attorney general to seek a court order against the targeted offshore website that would, in turn, be served on Internet providers in an effort to make the target virtually disappear”.

In short, ISPs can be pressured to block off access to certain websites – ie censorship.

Naturally, the major supporters of the act are the entertainment industry, who claim to be victims of acts of online “piracy”. The bill is expected to come to a vote when the US Congress meets next.

However, CEOs representing major companies in the digital industries – like Google, Twitter, Mozilla, Yahoo! and Facebook – have come out to oppose it through an open letter.

Nowhere in the letter, however, do these CEOs claim that the Internet is a right.

Instead, they write that the act will allow the US government “to censor the web using techniques similar to those used in China, Malaysia and Iran” – which, I suppose, would infringe freedom to information via censorship.

They also claim that the act will “deny website owners the right to due process of law”, which infringes the right to a fair trial.

In his article, Cerf wrote: “The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information – and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time.”

Cerf also noted that a larger issue has been overlooked amid this debate, and that is the “responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights”.

He proposed that engineers take on a larger role in ensuring that technology continues to protect users and help them exercise their human rights.

I would like to take this one step further and suggest that it is not just the CEOs, technologist and even people like Cerf, who should take on this role.

We – the users – should as well.

In 2012, I hope that users will empower themselves more, through knowledge and practice, to ensure that nothing (and definitely not their own actions) compromises what amazing technologies we have that makes the world a better place.

* Niki is an MA Digital Culture and Society student at King’s College London. Read his jottings on digital culture at www.nikicheong.com or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/nikicheong.

JUST like that, 2011 has passed us by and so much has happened in the technology world. Both of us can hardly keep up with what’s been happening, given the break-neck speed at which things changed and developed all year long.

More significantly, technology has shown this year that it matters beyond the world of geeks; it has played a major role in the world at large, particularly at the intersection of technology, society and culture.

This year was where all these forces came head to head. And along that vein, each of us has picked our choices of the most significant technology-related moments of the past year.

 

Tablets and the Amazon Kindle Fire

Right from the start 2011 was hailed the “year of the tablet”. Google was releasing Honeycomb, and several manufacturers had already shown off prototypes of other Android tablets.

We were pretty much bound for disappointment on this count, until Amazon came out with the Kindle Fire recently.

Okay, so it hasn’t hit Malaysia yet but the Kindle Fire did what a bunch of other 2011 tablets challenging the iPad failed to do: It changed the game, faster than even Apple could.

You see, before the Kindle Fire, the tablet market was all about product specifications, faster processors, cooler Android skins and better marketing. Prices hovered near the iPad range, and the only real innovation was the seven-inch form factor first introduced by Samsung via its Galaxy Tab.

The Kindle Fire changed all that with a US$199 (RM628) price tag, and decent enough specs and a beautiful screen. More importantly, it wasn’t a tablet for the sake of being a tablet, but rather as a gateway to buying all of Amazon’s digital content and goods.

Rather than making money off selling you a piece of hardware, Amazon is selling you a piece of hardware to make money off you buying videos, music, books and any other piece of content they can sell you from their store. The best part is – this model works and Amazon is the best positioned company to take this on. Next year, I’m expecting to see lots of solid tablet options aimed at competing with the Amazon Kindle Fire instead of the iPad, and lots of folks toting seven-inch tablets. – David Lian

 

Year of the Protestors

Say what you like about how social media was just an enabler of revolutions but I challenge you to find a time in history when so much change (and impact) could descend upon the world in under 365 days.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is thanks to social media. Granted, many of the revolutions were a long time-coming. After all, the sentiments that the public held in contempt of those in power are not new.

Yet, one can hardly argue that if it was not for social media networks – be it Facebook or Twitter – the public would have felt as empowered as they did, even in countries where the change they were hoping for did not come their way.

Time magazine may have named the “Protestors” as their Person Of The Year.

I would rather look at how social media was integral to their strategies for mobilising the people.

Just look at the #Occupy movement around the world as an example. – Niki Cheong

 

Group buying

Somewhere deep inside each of us, there’s a little Kiasu Malaysian waiting to get out. Unfortunately, that Kiasu Malaysian just got unleashed this year with the string of group buying sites now flooding the market.

Somehow, I don’t remember it being this prevalent in 2010, but when Groupon entered Malaysia by buying over local leader GroupsMore, it seemed to kick the group-buying trend in Malaysia up a couple of notches. Instead of seedy discounts offered for obscure holiday packages and slimming trials (or “experiences” as they were marketed previously), we get good discounts on good brands, and at the very least, some top name restaurants offering really good deals on meals.

The cheap person in me wants to rush out and buy as many Groupons as I can. The savvy person realises I’m probably going to forget to use half of them. – DL

 

Timelines

It may have only been rolled out for a couple of weeks but one of social media’s biggest stories of 2011 has to be the introduction of the Facebook Timeline.

People may whine and whinge about how it changes the look of their profile but this is probably the most significant aesthetic change Facebook has introduced in a long time.

Look aside, this move by the social media giant could serve as a warning to its competitors, especially as speculation of an IPO gets rife, to show just how much of an institution it already is.

Numbers or users aside (the largest in the world, in case you didn’t know), Timeline also shows other networks what Facebook has that they might not – years of history with its users.

Users who have been with the network from the beginning would have close to a decade’s worth of history saved onto the site, which is now available at a mere click. It not only helps users walk down memory lane but also reminds them just how much they (the user and Facebook) have gone through together over the years.

Who needs to write an autobiography these days? Just make your timeline public (if you dare to share your life with the world!). – NC

 

Steve Jobs

You might think it’s cliche that Steve Job gets a mention, but in my mind, his passing stands out as one of the best covered events on the Internet, surpassing even Michael Jackson’s.

When the announcement first broke on Twitter, it smashed a number of records with hashtags #iSad and #ThankYouSteve jamming up Twitter and Facebook. Then came the wave of inevitable Steve Jobs quotes flooding everyone’s wall. And this is merely on social network sites.

Blogs, columns and yes, whole websites, started commemorating the inventor of the Apple devices we all love. So if this doesn’t get him a mention as perhaps one of the biggest “things” to happen in the technology or social world, I don’t know what else does. - DL

 

Google+

While Google+ is not yet a #fail story, one really has to wonder when it’ll all come together for the Internet giant.

Earlier this year, Google released its new social network in beta mode to selected users, although control wasn’t that tight and most early adopters found themselves actively using it within weeks.

Unfortunately for Google, it seems that many of the said early adopters have left the network, or at least left their accounts idle.

The biggest problem? No one really knows what adding people to “Circles” mean. Facebook took the easy way out with “Friends” while Twitter’s “Follow” concept is easy enough to grasp. – NC

 

Circles is another issue

Despite the bad press (more to do with its initial push for users to use their real names), Google+ is still running, probably because it owns such a huge database of users from its Gmail accounts which makes it easier for new users to start using the network.

But you can’t force these things. If Google doesn’t think of more nifty ideas (such as organising a Google+ Hangout session between the Dalai Lama and Reverend Desmond Tutu), Google+ might just go along the same route as Google Wave and Google Buzz before it.

And that’s nowhere. – NC

IN the past few years, social media “predictions” have been a popular subject to approach, especially towards the end of the year.

With social media being such a “new” phenomenon, it was easy getting caught up in it. Will next year see Twitter trump Facebook, or will Google come up with something to kill off its blue nemesis (it tried, and failed miserably in 2011)?

Who can blame the experts, analysts or academics their predictions? After all, isn’t this the era of new media technologies that move so fast there’s always something new to look into?

Well, not really.

If anything, 2011 has taught us that it’s not the mediums and the networks we should be focusing on.

There was the prediction that this was the year of geolocation – you could tag your tweets with data about where you were, while Facebook’s “check-in” was supposedly going to crush Foursquare. Except that it never really took off, so Facebook essentially killed it and Foursquare remains a niche network.

Some people who saw this coming decided that it would be more accurate to look at it from a business point of view. After all, how many new networks can one deal with? So, while predictions about which social media network will go public entertained us all year, we’re actually still guessing when all of it will happen.

I suspect that while we obsessed over what was coming next – in an effort to one up each other – we forgot to look at what was already at hand.

The biggest mistake in 2011 was asking what was coming next when we should have focused on what the current big guns had in store.

If we just looked at the more mainstream networks, Facebook introduced the social graph and its Timeline, which look set to change the way the Internet functions forever.

Twitter gave us several new looks – not just via its web version but also with its native apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Then more recently, we saw the re-emergence of the “anti-social social network” Path, an iPhone app that once allowed you to add only 50 friends (its reincarnation allows 150). The first time it launched, it died a slow death but rose from the ashes over the past few weeks by “borrowing” ideas from successful applications like Facebook (with its own timeline feature) and Instagram’s photo manipulation concept.

The best part is that it allowed you to connect each update via its application with the most popular existing networks – Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare.

It’s early days still but it looks set to be the next iPhone app du jour. Why? Well, it’s because it acknowledges the power of the aforementioned social networks and attempts to survive by complementing them as opposed to competing with them.

If my interpretation of what Path is doing is correct, then 2011 would have been the year that the biggest social networks made their mark and withstood any of its competitors – Google+ and Diaspora (what?).

So where does this leave us as 2012 approaches?

I wouldn’t dare make any predictions, really. At this stage, I feel like we’ve been obsessing over social media so much that we’ve forgotten the largest digital ecosystem in which it resides.

Along that vein, I would say that we can look forward to 2012 as the year where digital users empower themselves. We’ve already seen how social media assisted in protests – either in the Arab world or in many Western countries via the Occupy movement – so much so that Time magazine named the “protestors” as its person of the year.

My vision is that next year, we move forward from there and empower ourselves to be active users of social media by being more conscious of how we engage online, be aware of what we’re “liking” and retweeting and figure out how else we can be more efficient users of social media, than just following the trends.

I won’t predict that for 2012, but I would definitely hope for it.

* Niki Cheong is pursuing his Master’s degree in Digital Culture and Society in London. Connect with him via www.nikicheong.com or www.twitter.com/nikicheong.

By DAVID LIAN
alltherage@thestar.com.my

The holiday season is just around the corner, and for many people, this also means crazy sale, traffic jams and a gift-buying frenzy. But even before you head down to the nearest traffic jam, errr, I mean, shopping centre, your main challenge is figuring out what your friends want!

Fear not, though, as help is at hand. The Internet has revolutionised many industries and markets, and gifting (perhaps) might be just the industry it revolutionises next.

What people want

There’s nothing worse than discovering that someone’s random gift exchange at a party was what you gave your best friend last year (oops!). Like it or not, we’ve all probably received gifts we didn’t care much for, and probably have promptly re-gifted them to others.

This is why one needs a gift list, where everyone within a circle of friends or family unashamedly tells everyone else what they want. That way, there’ll be zero wastage and everyone will get something that’s useful to them.

A modern twist on the gift list is the new site Gift.Ly (www.gift.ly) that allows you and your friends to register and post your list online for others to see.
Once you’ve registered, Gift.Ly gives you a short link you can share with your friends, tweet or post on Facebook. It invites them to check out your list or share with you a list of their own. All your gift requests can be linked to URLs so your friends can do their shopping for you from their armchair and never get the wrong item.

An even more technologically-advanced take on the art of gift-buying comes from Imply Labs and their “predictive buying engine” at GiveEmThis (http://GiveEmThis.com).

The geek in me absolutely loves this technology. Here’s the deal, you can sign in with your Facebook account and select any of your Facebook friends.

GiveEmThis will then analyse your friends’ public data, such as his stream, posts and biography and age and interests, and then give you a list of suggested gifts from Amazon.

GiveEmThis only makes use of public data and gives you the option of using it anonymously as well, by simply entering a friend’s Twitter account you want it to analyse. Or, you could fill in a questionnaire and get results that way, too.

I tested GiveEmThis on myself and got some pretty accurate results. It recommended for me a series of card games, board games and gadgets, as well as the A Game Of Thrones Art Book (now, I’m really impressed!).

At the same time, it also recommended the Playskool Easy Bake Ultimate, which I thought was a little strange. I later realised that it’s probably because I’ve been posting stuff on Facebook about my daughter and my newborn son!

Let’s talk money

If you’re looking for stuff at great prices (aren’t we all?) I’ve only got one answer for your – group buying sites. I think group-buying as a business model is slightly tacky, but as a consumer, I’ve kind of grown addicted to checking the latest deals on sites, simply because there are some really good deals.

But first, here’s a caveat – be sure to really read through the fine print, and also remember to check out the delivery terms (for example, when will you receive the product?). Also, be sure to compare prices, as not everything is a good deal.

I find that Groupon (http://groupon.com.my) has the best deals in town. For me, variety is key, and some sites give you a lot of deals, but for very similar goods or services, like car washes, restaurant deals, and slimming/spa packages.

In contrast, I picked up a nice tailored suit at Groupon for RM700 recently.
Other sites I check frequently include Dealmates (http://dealmates.com), MilkADeal (http://milkadeal.com) and GroupEGo (http://groupego.com.my).

If you don’t care much for deals, and don’t mind buying stuff at full price, then there’s a bunch of cool webstores on MySimplifieds (http://mysimplifieds.com). You can browse through various categories and most likely find good deals from local sellers on what you want.

For a savvy and digital generation, I also think a great gift option is iTunes credit or digital goods such as PC games etc. You can get credit for computer games and iTunes through services such as MOL (www.mol.com.my) or OffGamers (http://offgamers.com).

The only place I buy my PC games now is the Steam online store (http://store.steampowered.com) where there are great daily deals.
I hope I’ve given you some ideas on what good gifts you can give and made selecting a gift for your best mates much less of a hassle. Now, that you also know what I’d like this holiday … feel free to send a gift my way too!

q David Lian wasn’t actually serious about that last comment asking you to send gifts his way. However, if you really want to send him something, tweet him at @davidlian and maybe he’ll give you his address.

A COUPLE of weeks ago, I took the train up to Oxford in Britain along with my classmates to listen to Richard Stallman speak.

 

By DAVID LIAN

alltherage@thestar.com.my

Played a game on Facebook or Google+ recently? Casual gaming seems to have taken the market by storm in the past year or so, with people on iPads and iPhones playing Zombie Cafe or Japan Life.

I was never a big fan of “free” and “casual” games online, especially those that are on Facebook and allows your friends to send invites (Read: spam) all over your Facebook wall like FarmVille, CityVille, Zoo Keeper and Mafia Wars.

The mechanics of the games seem simplistic – too simplistic. For example, an early version of Facebook game required you to “bite” as many Facebook friends as you could, and hope they would “bite” other people in return, all to see who would be the highest ranking “vampire.”

Clearly a Ponzi scheme turned into a game.

And then there’s the advent of free-to-play games proliferating the marketplace. These games adopt a model where an initial portion of the game is available for free while coaxing players to pay a fee (or multiple fees) to unlock more features.

There’s nothing wrong with the free-to-play model; even the much-acclaimed World of Warcraft game has gone free-to-play. However, it does seem to have spawned a host of cheaply made free games that aim to trick young people into paying huge amounts of money for virtual items they don’t need.

That doesn’t mean all casual, free-to-play, social network-based games are garbage, though. To my amazement, there does seem to be a market for these kinds of games. The kinds you don’t need a rigged out PC to play on.

There’s also been a fantastic amount of maturity in the games that have come out. From the simplistic “Ponzi scheme” games, the games have developed into surprisingly complex medium.

For example, this past week, I’ve re-discovered a good ol’ casual game I once played in its infancy – Urban Rivals (www.urban-rivals.com or just search on Facebook). The game takes some simple, yet strategically-deep card game mechanics – like bluffing – throws in the community experience, and wraps around a colourful background story of rival gangs fighting for supremacy, to create a complex yet fun experience.

If you like collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, or even poker, this game is right up your alley. Gameplay wise, it’s very simple. Each player is allocated four characters from his “deck” at the start of the match. Each character has a power statistic that denotes how good he is at attacking, and a damage statistic that tells you how much damage he does when he lands a hit.

To initiate an attack, you choose your team member and allocate a certain amount of energy, called “pillz”. The number of pillz you have is 12 at the start of the match, and you get one more on each turn. So, if I put four pillz on a character with eight power, I’ll get a final attack score of 32 attack. The highest attack wins.

The game is really about bluffing your opponent to commit too early or too much to a certain attack to win the game by reducing his life to zero.

Just signing up for the game gets each player a starter crew of eight characters, which is just enough to field a team for your first game. There are 21 clans in total in the game, and having two or more members from the same clan gives you a bonus.

Here’s the genius bit about the game: Players can buy or sell characters in a virtual market using in-game currency called “clintz.” You get clintz by winning battles or participating in weekly tournaments. Like the real world, you get to name your price on a team member you want to sell and prices fluctuate up and down depending on the flavour of the month.

For those who don’t want to save up on their clintz, there’s obviously an easier way to get the characters you want – just pay (RM10 gets you about three characters in-game).

Most importantly, the community is vibrant, the games are short (you can download an iPhone app) and the rewards are within reach. It’s a great way to get social, while your time away and enjoy a complex and skillful game. There’s even a Malaysian guild if you know where to look.

Another game I’ve checked out recently is Dragon Age Legends (search Facebook or Google+). This game lets you create a character and go on adventures with your real-life buddies in a high-fantasy world. It, too, seems to create a higher quality interactive experience than earlier simplistic games of its ilk.

So, is casual, online, free-to-play gaming set to become the next frontier?

On many levels, I think the answer is “yes”, if not already. Casual games are much more accessible to a society increasingly becoming strapped with time and money. Inversely, it’s compatible with the growth in smartphone and mobile Internet usage. After all, Angry Birds did become a phenomenon.

And yes, you can play them while at work (not that I condone such behaviour).

Yet, it’s a totally different class of games over the experience you’d expect from sitting down with a serious session of World Of Warcraft. Personally, I’m glad it’s matured to a point that I don’t feel I’m spamming people to get them to bite the next person.

To send virtual drinks (and other things) to David, tweet him at @davidlian.

LAST week, the technology industry in particular, and the world at large, mourned the death of a visionary. Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs died at the mere of 56, just one day after the announcement of the company’s latest iPhone release and new operating system.

Naturally, in this day and age, the news spread quickly. Social media was abuzz – #thankyouSteveJobs and #RIPstevejobs rose up the Twitter trending list quickly, while some people changed their Facebook avatars to mourn his death. Blogs were updated with stories of how Jobs, Apple or both have impacted their lives.

Then there were the other stuff – old YouTube videos featuring Jobs’ speeches became popular, links to web pages featuring his famous quotes were shared and images people had created in tribute of him and his work went viral. One of those images is a silhouette of Jobs with the Apple logo designed by Hong Kong graphic design student Jonathan Mak.

It goes without saying that Jobs was one of the catalysts for all that to be possible, thanks to the technology he introduced to the world. By extension, it was these technologies that contributed to the success of social media, which enabled the news of his death to spread quickly, and made it easy for all those other elements to go viral.

US President Barack Obama probably explained it best when he said in a statement: “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.”

Despite the fact that Jobs obviously had a major passion for technology, he also never saw it as an industry that worked in isolation. This, despite the fact that there is so much focus on digital industries at the moment and the communication revolution the world is going through.

Those who have watched the YouTube video of his speech at the Standford University commencement ceremony in 2004 (which has since gone viral after his death) would know that it wasn’t the potential of technology that made Apple what it is today.

In that speech, Jobs talked about how sitting in on a calligraphy class during his college years led to the introduction of typography into the Macintosh system (which, he alluded, Windows copied).

“It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way science can’t capture,” he said of calligraphy during the speech.

For someone who is so associated with technology and is a pioneer in the field (he also the person behind the success of animation studio Pixar), Jobs also appreciated the humanities.

He was also known for saying that Apple (and by default, himself) “existed at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.”

It was not enough that the company was producing the more advanced technologies, but these products had to be “intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, so that they really fit the users …”

As someone who has long admired Jobs, I feel that his biggest legacy he has left behind is not the Mac, or the iPhone or the iPad.

It is the understanding and belief that technology cannot be seen in isolation of every thing else in the world. It is equally important to appreciate what has come before it.

Social media may have helped many of the media featuring Jobs go viral, but without the original mediums – whether it was the video recording of the speeches, the transcription of his interviews for the quotes or even that logo that Jonathan Mak created – there would be nothing to share and spread.

With the current obsession with technology and social media, it is easy to overlook this. Who can blame anyone? After all, this is an exciting time we’re living in and it’s already hard enough keeping up with technology, let alone worry about everything else.

Which is why it is important that moments like these when were are in the mood to look back and reflect (on Jobs’ life and legacy, for example), even if it is caused by something as sad as death, that we remind ourselves of the wise words of someone like him.

In one of his final public appearances on stage, Jobs said that “technology alone is not enough … it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that make our hearts sing.”

Rest in peace, Steve.

* Niki is currently reading for his MA Digital Culture and Society in King’s College London. You can connect with him at www.nikicheong.com or www.twitter.com/nikicheong.