I’ve been pretty quiet lately. I’ve been busy as of late, working this year at X-Mester again and working with my good friend Tony on our re:build web conference coming up at the end of July. There’s a lot going on.

So, it seems like the perfect time to start another project!

While I was away at X-Mester, I was getting up at 6 AM, maintaining client work, teaching and supervising students and going to bed around midnight. There wasn’t a lot of time for much of anything else. So I got behind in the news of the tech world, something I follow very closely. I’m a news junkie that way.

It made me realize how much most things just do not matter. The endless stream of Facebook posts about nothing, Twitter posts that seem out of context to everyone but that person and all the news stories that happened in my industry that were of such little quality.

I wanted a website where I can go to and find out all the important stuff really, really fast that’s well designed and with no distractions. I’ve always wanted something like that even when I’m at the office during the day working. I can easily spend a whole afternoon in RSS Hell reading story after story. Most of them aren’t really worth it. Have you ever read a blog post that changed your life? No, of course not.

So that’s why I’m soft-launching SlowNews.me. A site that’s run by me where I’ll post all the big stuff, the stuff that matters. For now, I’m getting into the swing of things, so posting may be off my self-imposed deadline of twice daily (by 6 am and lunch).

No more wading through posts about endless Apple rumors (“A 24 inch iPad by next week!”) or endless dribble about some new phone (“The Nokia N93522914 is coming soon!!1!!1″) or posts about how to upgrade your browser to the latest version of Chrome. I don’t need that and neither do you. Those sites post stories for the sake of posting. Listening to podcasts is too time consuming and using Twitter for news is fine if you want to organize a bunch of lists to keep all the power-users from dominating your stream. I’m posting for the sake of sanity.

It’s tech news at the speed of productivity for developers, designers, tech lovers and users. It’s time to get back to work.

Check it out at www.slownews.me. You can learn more about the site at www.slownews.me/about.

Facebook is dead. The spam has won.

I’ve been using Facebook for nearly 7 years now and I cringe to think how much time I’ve wasted on it, but I don’t think it’s been that much compared to a lot of other people. I use Facebook like this:

1. Login
2. Look at the recent status updates
3. Maybe make a few comments
4. View photos if they look interesting

I’ve enjoyed Facebook for years because it’s seemingly removed the need for a high school reunion. I know what everyone’s up to, who does what and so on. I don’t follow much family on Facebook, but I can see how that’d be nice, too.

Lately, things have started to change. Facebook, like any other company, can’t just say, “Well, that’s perfect. Let’s just maintain this now and not innovate anymore.” Could you imagine if Henry Ford thought the Model T was “just perfect” and left it at that? What if Microsoft stopped at Windows ME? Companies and people can’t just get to a point and stop. That’s how societies stagnate and crumble.

The trick, however, is innovating and growing in a mature, sensible way with purposeful iteration.

Facebook grew out of the .edu-only years and started enabling everyone with anything to say a place to say it. They innovated quickly, pushed changes at people very quickly and without warning. A slew of privacy issues has come of it, too. Under pressure from Twitter, Gowalla, FourSquare and others, they’ve added real-time status updates, check-ins, chat, email, photo sharing and they’ve monetized by putting ads in front of people that are creepily more targeted than Google’s famed AdWords.

Facebook is the new AOL, trying to be everything to everyone and in the process is becoming nothing to no one. Here’s what I see right now as I log into Facebook:

With all due respect to the original authors, the first two posts are effectively ads. The third post is about a music video I don’t care about or like. The rest are seemingly mundane posts that I either don’t understand or have no affinity to. The last post is a check-in from someone I went to high school with. I’m sure they’re having a fine time, but I don’t know where that is or why I should care. It’s one thing to check in from the White House, Grand Canyon, Times Square or the Space Station. It’s another to post that you’re at some random bar. The events are always pointless to me because everyone invites me to everything from a birthday party to a meetup to a political event. Has anyone ever looked at their Facebook wall and thought, “Hey, I want to do that, too!” or “I’m there, too! Let’s meet!”

In my mind, Facebook is the ultra-social site that combines the one-off services from other providers. Check-ins from FourSquare or Gowalla, statuses from Twitter, photos from Flickr, video from YouTube and so on. It’s becoming a bit much.

I’ve taken the time to at least try to curate my friends list. I know many individuals who have blocked me on Facebook, mostly old high school classmates. That’s fine because we didn’t have that much in common anyway. But now I find that Facebook is becoming “User Streamed Spam”. I guess I do it, too, with blog post links and the sort. But I do try to curate my posts as best I can. I respect people’s viewing experience on Facebook. Most people do not and post whatever pops in their mind.

Twitter, for me, is a better experience. I’ve carefully selected who I do and don’t want to follow, which admittedly, doesn’t happen as much on Facebook. On Facebook, I tend to hide a lot of people. Usually people who I met once somewhere and now they know me from some event I hosted. I’ve unlinked my Twitter and Facebook account in an attempt to refocus status updates to both targets differently at times. And, I’ve un-followed people on Twitter because I follow them on Facebook (or vice-versa) and I got tired of seeing the same thing. That became very cumbersome. Now, Facebook has removed the ability to hide apps on your wall, too. It’s almost as if they’re forcing me to see everyone’s horoscope.

Maybe I’m an old fuddy-duddy, but I don’t like Facebook anymore. It isn’t fun, social or unique like it used to be. While I admit to using Facebook to blurt out some things I’m hosting, I try not to do it a lot. And, I actually do take the time to think about clever things to post on Facebook. No one cares about my dinner, I get that, and I don’t post about it. Heck, I don’t even care about  my dinner. I also try not to repost the same old things that have spread around the web time and time again.

The new polling feature is the death nail for me. I answered a question once, out of boredom, and lo, it re-posted to my feed with no way for me to know or delete it. I spammed people with some dumb question and didn’t even know it. I don’t care whether you like Pepsi or Coke enough to want to see it on my wall at 2:30 in the afternoon.

And, as an aside, on two occassions this week I’ve posted comments on two different people’s Facebook statuses. One, for instance, claimed that Obama moved his State of the Union Speech to accomodate Dancing with the Stars. That’s sorta true, if it weren’t for the fact that the State of the Union happens in January. I mentioned a correction that the speech was about Libya. A few minutes later, that post was deleted. How dare facts make it on to the Internet. On another occasion, someone removed a post because, I guess, they don’t like me. That’s fine, but it makes for a bad experience. That’s probably why Facebook doesn’t have a “Dislike” button. Everyone would get mad at everyone and just leave.

I’ll be leaving Facebook alone for a while and spending more time among the people and content I care more about over at Twitter. You can follow me @jlharter (or @justifystudios or @refreshindy or @rebuildconf). But unlike Facebook where it seems rude not to befriend a person when you both know you know each other, Twitter doesn’t have that culture so don’t expect me to automatically follow you back. It reminds me more of the early Facebook. I ‘like’ that.

Google:

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

Translation: “We see you people trying to game our system by doing a bunch of bogus link crap. Stop it.”

Yesterday we went around the Fountain Square area in Indianapolis to celebrate some of the many small businesses there by handing out free cookies. It’s our way of celebrating the small business opportunities that still abound in the area.

Today, we’re heading further west to Plainfield, Indiana, a fast-growing Indianapolis suburb that hasn’t lost it’s charm to traditional suburbanization with strip malls and chain stores. Instead, Plainfield’s retaining a lot of their historic downtown and main street feel. We’ve got a few areas picked out to visit, complete with cookies.

To answer the question “Is Internet Explorer 9 a modern browser“, Mozilla had this to say:

Let me list stuff that IE9 can do others don’t:

• text-overflow doesn’t work in Firefox 4.
• Calc is not supported in Chrome 9.

So that’s why I don’t consider IE9 a Modern Browser.

Ok, pretty straightforward. And Microsoft responds with all this…

Modern browsers are fast. They take full advantage of the underlying platform to render graphics with the GPU, compile and execute JavaScript across multiple CPU cores and ensure that web applications run as close as possible to the same speed as native applications.

Modern browsers enable rich, immersive experiences that could hitherto only be delivered through a plug-in or native application. They can blend video, vector and raster graphics, audio and text seamlessly without sacrificing performance.

Modern browsers implement features when they are ready, providing predictable patterns that developers can rely on rather than suddenly breaking or removing specifications. They don’t check off support based on a half-completed implementation written to pass a synthetic test, but validate against a test suite that confirms interoperability.

Modern browsers do adopt standards at an early stage of readiness so developers can experiment and validate the specification, but clearly delineate unstable prototypes as such.

Jimminy, what a bunch of big words. “Hitherto”, “providing predictable patterns”, “delineate”, “rich, immersive experiences”? At the very least, this proves Microsoft is not a modern company. I agree with the sentiment that IE9 is better than IE8, but that’s about it. It’ll still be the bane of web developers everywhere.

One part I hated about high school and college writing was having to supply a bibliography. I get the importance and they’re several legitimate purposes for knowing how to do it later in life. That never stopped me from not learning how to do it, though. Too many rules and standards that I don’t use enough to remember anyway. So, for years, I’ve always just used NoodleBib to do it for me. Microsoft Word also has a handy feature that does the same thing, but it’s not as easy on the eyes as NoodleBib.

Now, there’s Quick Cite, a 99-cent app for iPhones and Androids that automates the task of citing by allowing the user to scan the barcode on the book, then it emails you the citation formatted to one of the four common styles, like APA or MLA.

It was made by 7 undergrads at the University of Waterloo in 7 days. Now, they’ve learned a skill that will actually prove useful and make them money, as opposed to writing all those papers no one cares about.

The American Red Cross has their Twitter uh-oh moment:

Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head’s midas Touch beer…. when we drink we do it right $gettngslizzerd

That rogue tweet, from a staffer who inadvertently used the wrong account in Hootsuite, won’t be fired and they’ve apologized for the mistake by deleting the tweet and stating they’re sober and they’ve confiscated the keys. At least they have a sense of humor about it.

Interestingly, early reports indicate it may have caused a slight surge in the amount of blood and money donated to the Red Cross.

From Google:

We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. One of the signals we’re exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

I’m going to take credit for that:

Maybe Google needs to be a little less automated and a little more human?

My suggestion would be for Google to get more customizable. I know I can do filters and searches within the search box, but that’s a pain every time I want to do a search. Why can’t I just tell Google, “Never show me results from about.com, ehow.com, etc.”? A simple blacklist feature in my account settings can go a long way.

Justin Harter founded Justify Studios and is also the founder of RefreshIndy, a fast-growing group of web designers, developers and media artists from around Indianapolis and Central Indiana. Generally, Refresh brings these creative professionals together to share stories, news and ideas.

In January, Refresh takes part in Refresh Weekend, a 48-hour non-stop website design event for charity. Volunteers work on teams of five, sometimes alongside people they may not even know, to work for an organization they may have never heard of. By the end of the weekend, hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of code have been developed and deserving charities from across Marion County get a great new website to boost their efforts in the work that they do.

In 2010, the first year for the event, Refresh had three teams working around the clock. In 2011, we’re shooting for five teams for a total of 25 volunteers.

Each charity is chosen based on their need, the impact they have on the community and the potential impact having a great website would give them. In addition to getting a website, each charity also gets a professionally-produced video that showcases the work they do. The video gets published to their website, as well as YouTube and Vimeo.

IUPUI is a supporting sponsor of Refresh Weekend as part of their Week of Service for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. The School of Informatics at IUPUI allows us to use their facility to house the event and many Informatics students get to work alongside experienced professionals during the whole weekend.

Justin coordinates the event, organizers the volunteers and food, personally interviews the charities before selection and works with other organizations in the community to help support our efforts. He also makes a lot of coffee during that weekend. A lot.