Cloud computing is all the rage right now. With netbooks growing in popularity, all sorts of Internet-based services are popping up to make the experience of owning a netbook more rich. OnLive applies this model to PC gaming while broadening its appeal way beyond the netbook crowd. Where an app like Google Documents might outsource a little processor load and some data storage, OnLive’s system will send all of the intense load to your CPU and graphics card associated with PC gaming to a monstrous computer hundreds of miles away. The benefits are clear. While existing web apps have sold themselves to the typical PC user on convenience (e.g. the ability to access documents anywhere), this is the only service I can think of that has a chance to sell itself by saving gamers significant money on the hardware that is typically necessary to run these intensive games… not to mention the dedication to keep up with frequent upgrades just to maintain the performance status-quo. An entry-level gaming PC is going to cost around $800. This system enables a $300 netbook to do the same thing by relegating every task associated with the game other than actual display of the resulting video stream.

There are also implications here for the established modes of game distribution. In my most recent post, I discussed a possibility for a new model of game distribution that does away with the physical product altogether, but that proposition did not suggest any fundamental shifts in the way gaming works—only the way they are distributed. Digital distribution platforms have gained significant popularity over the past year. OnLive’s distribution model is digital, but it seems to be something of a hybrid between GameTap and Steam. I honestly don’t understand the model entirely, but Steve Perlman claimed in an interview there will be tiers of service which suggests a subscription model while the interface’s options for either buying or renting any given title suggests a more traditional model of paying per title. This is serious competition on either front. Steam will have difficulty as games that are available for both services will have significantly lower requirements through OnLive. Subscription services like GameTap typically serve so-called “casual” gamers better and contain few if any new release hardcore games. OnLive is coming into this with major partnerships with huge publishers (and committments for simultaneous release with retail) to give it some more muscle.

For the numerous advantages, this service already has a few small disadvantages I can see. First, the max resolution being quoted right now is 720p which is a bit behind the times. I understand there are now Internet bandwidth considerations as the resolution increases, and I’m sure that is the reason for this choice. It doesn’t make it any better for gamers that crave high fidelity experience with their PC gaming and are accustomed to running 1920×1200 or higher resolutions on their PCs. Second, with any digital distribution model comes concerns about consumer issues. As with other similar platforms, many consumers will likely not be comfortable with the license they are actually purchasing. Every software purchase is merely a license whether or not you receive a physical product, but, frankly, it is much easier for software publishers to enforce unreasonable demands in a license while they still control the software. If I have a disc, I can always resell it whereas a digital software purchase may be impossible to transfer.

For all my excitement, I am sceptical. It sounds much to good to be true. The only way we’ll know (before an actual launch, that is) is by getting in on the beta which should start this summer. If OnLive launches at an attractive price, good performance, and reasonable licensing agreements, this may be the Trojan horse that brings PC gaming back to the forefront.

As such, Facebook had to respond. Founder Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement about the new terms. This statement basically said they would never actually use all the rights granted to them by the new TOS. Their intent was only to be able to continue displaying content that had been sent to friends even after a user leaves Facebook so as not to upset the continuity of the friend’s experience. In fact, Facebook claims the terms do not allow them to use your content in any way they wish. I’m certainly no lawyer, but I have trouble seeing the limits of a “perpetual worldwide license.” I can understand the desire to allow friends to continue accessing content even if the contributor has left the community. It would be jarring if messages and shared items were to disappear as friends leave. However, I think Facebook’s approach is a bit of overkill. It seems to me they could have reserved their rights to continue displaying user content in the way that user intended even after departing by merely adding that these were in fact the rights they had to the content rather than the blanket statement that actually ended up in the terms.

Luckily, your voices did not go unheard. Facebook launched a poll to gauge user response to the new terms. Fifty-six percent of users preferred the old TOS, and alas it was restored. The new terms would have granted Facebook too much in the way of rights to user content. However, the deft response to users’ concerns is encouraging for a company so large. Certainly, Facebook could have maintained the new TOS and probably suffered very little as a result. Online communities have come to realize that their most vocal users are the hardest to please but are also their greatest assets. They are often the first and loudest to complain, but they are also the most frequent contributors to the ongoing conversation amongst users that is the sole reason these services can exist. I, for one, applaud Facebook for listening to user concerns and responding. As a content creator myself, I understand that if I give up rights to my content online, I have nothing.

In other countries, bandwidth caps are old news, but the major US broadband providers have only begun to cap users’ monthly bandwidth allotment. Comcast instituted a cap of 250GB on its residential Internet service which began in October of last year after several years of an invisible “bandwidth ceiling.” Before the cap was instituted, there was, in fact, a cap, but no one knew exactly what it was. Even users who hit the cap would never be told exactly what line they had crossed to cause their service to be halted. It seems Comcast wanted these users to, rather than knowing the limit which they would undoubtedly reach every single month, drastically reduce their usage unaware of their actual allotment. They then decided that the Bittorrent protocol was most likely the root of their problems at which time they began throttling data transferred over the protocol. This garnered a good amount of bad publicity and drew the ire of the FCC who ruled that throttling of a particular protocol was illegal.

No one wants to try to sell a service that has previously been unlimited as “limited.” Comcast had tried every way it could to covertly reduce its bandwidth costs, but it essentially had no remaining options but to be forthright with consumers. In September, Comcast informed them their services would, as of October, be limited to 250GB monthly. This move seemed to open Pandora’s box for US terrestrial ISPs to begin instituting their own bandwidth caps. Time Warner had begun testing a 40GB monthly cap in Beaumont, Texas back in June of ’08 but only on Wednesday of last week announced expansion of the program to new cities. AT&T announced in November of last year tiered caps ranging from 20GB to 150GB. Charter just last week announced a cap of 100GB on speeds of 15mbps and slower and 250GB up to their 25mbps offering. Cellular data providers have been capping service for a while now with most currently at 5GB per month.

No one likes caps, but the consensus seems to be that Comcast’s cap is fair. I can attest that I would really have to try hard to exceed it in a typical month, and I am a pretty heavy Internet user. Time Warner’s cap is ridiculously low at 40GB. I could see even average users exceeding this cap on a regular basis, and, at $1 per GB over, they aren’t going to be very happy about it. Charter’s caps are low considering the speed. Even Comcast’s cap will become less and less reasonable as speeds increase and online video gains ubiquity. I venture a guess that, in two years time, 250GB will not serve the needs of even the average Internet user. We have to assess the probability of Comcast increasing the cap to keep up with the times. Barring some competition from a new national broadband ISP offering net-neutral and unmetered access, it seems unlikely they would increase the cap.

Another issue to consider is that, when bandwidth is capped, increased speeds are no longer really a selling point. An increase in speed effectively reduces the portion of the month for which you will have access if you fully utilize that speed. ISPs will undoubtedly continue to market new speed increases as a selling point never pointing out this fact. Deceptive? Sure. Illegal? Doubtful.

As consumers become more aware of the limitations, content providers who depend on this bandwidth to connect with customers (like Hulu or Netflix‘s Instant Watch) will have to scale back offerings to fit within consumer limitations. We won’t ever be streaming Blu-ray movies from Netflix on a 250GB cap whether or not speeds will support it. This will stifle growth, innovation, and creativity among Internet content providers.

We have essentially returned to the days of being ever-mindful of our Internet usage patterns. Now, instead of counting hours, we count bits. The days of carefree Internet usage are most likely over. Here’s hoping for an ISP in shining armor to deliver us great speed unfettered at a reasonable price. It’s our only hope.

Once you have installed the extension, it places three or four (depending on your options) controls to the right of the “From” field in Gmail when composing a message. The first is a dropdown menu which allows you to select one of four different signatures. If you have multiple sending accounts setup in Gmail, you have four signature slots for each one. In other words, the signature I have named “Default” can be different when I am sending from my primary account versus sending from the account provided by my employer. This is very handy. For most of my accounts, I am posting my personal contact information as well as the raddevon.com logo linked to the site. For my work account, I have my name, work e-mail account, and work phone number. Once I change sending accounts, these signatures are automatically swapped.

The second button displayed activates the editor. The editor is where the action happens. The top box allows the user to enter the HTML to generate the desired signature. The bottom pane displays the preview. There is also a link above the editing box that sends the user to a page with some basic tips about building a signature.

The third button reinserts the signature in case there are problems. It is only visible once activated using the fourth button—Options. The options are minimal. You may choose whether to insert the signature above or below quoted text when sending a reply, provide alternative names for your four signatures, and display the “Reinsert” button.

The extension works wonderfully. I have noticed two quirks with my e-mail signatures, and I’m almost certain they are limitations within Gmail itself. First, the preview will show alternate link colors when your signature is styled as such with CSS. However, these are reverted back to default colors when the e-mail is actually sent. Second, I had included a Skype link to allow recipients to click my Skype username and call me directly. That link appears to be nerfed by Gmail when it reaches its recipient. I imagine Gmail limits the protocols of any links in e-mail to a list of “safe” protocols. Evidently, “skype:” is not among them.

If you’re not already an HTML guru, there are a few concepts you will want to keep in mind:

1. Line breaks in HTML are not as simple as pressing the “Enter” key. HTML ignores any white space beyond the first press of the space bar. Line breaks must be invoked by placing a <br /> in the desired location.
2. Images use this tag: <img src="http://path.to/image.jpg" />. Of course, you will have to insert your own path based on the image’s location. It can’t be on your hard drive. Otherwise, anyone without access to that drive (which describes most of your desired recipients) will not see it. Try a free image hosting service like ImageShack if you aren’t sure where to put your image.
3. Hyperlinks are made with <a href="http://path.to/page.html"> </a>. You may notice this tag has two sides. Anything between is linked to the path referenced by the “href” attribute. This can be plain text to link a word or words, or it can be an image tag to link that image.
4. If you want to use CSS in your signature, you can use it inline by adding a “style” attribute to whichever element you want to affect. If it’s an image, that would look something like this: <img src="http://path.to/image.jpg" style="insert CSS here" />. If you want to style a block of text, you can enclose it in a <div></div> tag with a style attribute like this: <div style="insert CSS here">Text to style</div>. There are other ways to add CSS as well, but this is the simplest.

This should get you going. Now, get out there and create a killer signature to make a big impression on your recipients. Plug your blog, give people a way to contact you, and pimp your expertise. Ready, set, GO!

I have not yet had an opportunity to try the new feature, and I am unclear if it does anything more than telling the original poster of the content that you did, in fact, like it. The FriendFeed “Like” link reshares an item to your subscribers which is really handy. It makes sense that, if you do like something, you would want your friends to be able to see it regardless of whether they have a relationship to the original poster.

The consensus seems to be that this will not have a profound effect on the FriendFeed community. FriendFeed is a very tightly knit community whereas Facebook is looser and all-encompassing. I tend to agree that FriendFeeders are not going to leave the service for Facebook. FriendFeed is to Facebook as a small rural town is to NYC.

Google Chrome Extensions Coming Out by May!

Many users feel that a small percentage of users have a much better chance of hitting the homepage with a story even if another user broke the story first. In my estimation, this is largely true. It seems that some users are able to exploit their networks to force their stories to the top. This brings about a couple of questions. First, is this even a problem? These power users have done something to build the networks they have. Should they not be entitled to use them? Secondly, if this is a problem, how can it be fixed? Is there any way to prevent the system from being abused while also maintaining its democratic nature?

Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson talked to the LA Times and addressed these and other issues. Below is an excerpt from the interview in which they directly address the problem of “power users.”

A lot of Digg users seem to complain about the high percentage of front-page stories submitted by top users. Should the average user realistically expect to be able to get a story to the front page, or should they understand that it’s way more complex than just pressing “submit” and crossing your fingers?

Rose: You have to realize that out of the tens of thousands of stories that are on the Web, we only promote 100 to 130ish a day. So your shot at getting on the homepage is already pretty small. Then you have to look at, who are the people that are the taste makers and the ones that are living and breathing this stuff, and the first to find a story and submit it -– there’s a certain dedicated core group of users that are out there doing that kind of thing.

But every single day we promote people on the front page that have never had a story up there — people who managed to find a really unique, strange article that no one else has seen before.

Adelson: Or if they break news –- there are lots of first-time promotions from people who found or submitted a story at the moment of publication. If that happens, that person might get promoted first, just because it’s the first version of that story.

But how would anyone notice the submission if it was from an unknown user?

Adelson: They see it in the Upcoming sections. There’s another section of Diggers combing through the new submissions.

Rose: They also get the recommendation based on who that user is and who they’re tied to.

Their friend network…

Rose: Yeah, but even if they don’t have a friend network, it’s linked to their “similar user” network. That’s where the recommendation engine is. So let’s say you’re digging a story on the Audi R8 — and you don’t have any friends on Digg, but you love Audi R8 stories. We’re going to know that and spread that story to similar diggers, and they’ll see it when they go into the Upcoming section.

And that’s where we’ll be going in the future -– we’ll be providing a more customized view of our front page, and promotion at a different level to different interest groups. So if my mom comes in and she’s huge into cross stitch, she should have a place where she can submit a story and it’ll spread to all those similar users. Where we’re going will be a more personalized experience that everyone can participate in -– not just a certain niche like we have today –- we want to expand it into smaller niches.

Be sure to check out the full interview at the LA Times.

It seems to me they don’t really perceive this as a problem at the moment. Hopefully, the new measures to prevent duplicate submission will allow some of us mortal users to get stories on the page when we do in fact submit them first, but I don’t really see the power users digging articles they would rather submit themselves. I think Digg is about power for them, and, even if they see that a story they want to submit is submitted by someone else first, they will be unlikely to Digg since there is no benefit to themselves.

I have actually noticed this phenomenon myself and have moved most of my activity in the social news space to reddit. It seems much less susceptible to these problems. I have had a couple of stories hit the front page there with zero network.

Post your thoughts in the comments. What are your favorite social news sites? Do you believe power users are gaming Digg and ruining it for the rest of us?