Evan Samek’s blog

While I know many readers of my blog are well versed in Twitter, I have been asked a common question and I think I would publicly answer it in a quick blog post.

The question was:

I have a question. I am following people and in their tweets, Sometimes I see @-reply’s from people in my timeline and sometimes I don’t.  I want to be able to see ALL of someone’s tweets, is there a way to do this?

~Anonymous

This is a great question, here is whats going on:

Unfortunately no.  Pretty much what Twitter has done is make it mandatory to be friends with the person who is being reply to. So if I am X and you are Y and some other person is Z, If I(X) tweet Z and you(Y) don’t know Z, then you would not see my(X) reply to Z. If you knew Z however, and I @-replied to him/her, then you would see my @-reply to Z in your(Y) time-line.

There used to be an option in your settings to change this, but they removed it (I believe) to help lower traffic and also to increase privacy in conversations on twitter in a, now that I think about it, odd way.

Google Fail

So I live in College Park, Maryland; which is directly on the North Western side of the infamous Beltway…and let me tell you: traffic is a bitch right outside of DC.

For those of you unfamiliar with the DC area, there is a single, unifying highway that loops completely around the metropolitan area of Washington and it is absolutely plagued (daily) with traffic.  It is, with out a doubt, one of the most traffic-prone highways in the country, and it can take up to an hour and a half just to travel 15 miles to my hometown of Rockville, Maryland.

Anyways, if duty, family or friends call and I need to head back west towards Rockville, I have taken it upon myself to check Google Maps for the traffic.  Google recently started collecting location data from people who use smartphones and have Google Maps installed.  When this geo-location data is cross referenced with location change over time gives Google the unique opportunity to display live traffic on their maps…or so they say.

Whats that you say? That sounds awesome! Well it would be, if the damn data was correct.

Tonight I took a short trip back to the Rockville area for a meeting that was scheduled to begin at around 7:30pm.  I figured, given no traffic, I would be able to venture home in about 30min MAX.  So I open up my browser and head over to maps.google.com, only to discover at about 7:00pm (optimal time for departure from College Park under ideal circumstances) that the entire route back is shaded in red.  Red = slow (or sometimes danger or stop…but this is irrelevant to this discussion).

Since according to Google Maps the traffic was bad and I had no time to waste, I decided to head out west anyway. And guess what? NO TRAFFIC.

I was in a green situation, not a red catastrophe like I was expecting.  After about 5 minutes on the highway, traversing many more miles than Google Maps predicted, I checked Google Maps on my Palm Pre.  Still red! Even in the area I was currently in.

So no, Google Maps can’t possibly have “live” traffic reporting.  I even restarted my phone just to see if it was a caching problem…but no, Google was just flat out wrong.

Google, take off the “live traffic” label on your maps.  I really rely on that to planning my schedule in a hectic traffic are of the country. Could you (Google) or anyone else provide a legitimate excuse for a misrepresentation like this? I can’t see one…and I am part of the Google Generation.  My contemporaries, at the very least, need to feel like they can rely on Google…and usually they deliver.  But no on this one.

I’d really like more in depth idea of how Google’s Live Traffic feature truly works, or the “Live” aspect of the system needs to be revised or removed. Gracias.

</end rant>

As most of you probably noticed, I have been mentioning Pixel Dreamer many times in my tweets and comments around the Internet.  Pixel Dreamer is my new company, which was founded by Mac Sheller-Ogden (my partner) and myself to help small and medium sized business’ find success in the online world.

Mac and I started working together at a marketing firm located in Georgetown, DC where we both found common ground on web practices and standards based solutions.  Over time, I became increasingly frustrated with the firm with their lack of web 2.0/3.0 practices, and eventually left toward the end of summer 2008.  Mac worked there for a while longer before moving to Chicago doing exclusively remote work for the company, until finally leaving to start Pixel Dreamer.

After enough money was saved, we decided to make a run for our money and start preparing Pixel Dreamer for launch this past September.  At its core, we wanted Pixel Dreamer to be done right from the get-go.  We setup our online client management tools, invoicing systems, work-spaces, and various other communication tools. Just for reference, here are the tools that we use to get things done:

• Backpack – 37 Signals – For notes, ideas, and write-boards.
• Highrise – 37 Signals – Contact Management
• Action Method Online – Behance – Task Delegation
• Rackspace Hosting – Our Cloud Hosting Solution

Believe me, these weren’t the first system that we tried out.  We tested about 20+ management/administration tools that are available and we finally settled with this list.

In addition to opening ourselves up for business, we also created PD.AM – a URL shortener that was to be used with twitter to save character space in tweets.  We are currently in the process of improving the API documentation so that PD.AM has a chance at becoming integrated with popular twitter clients such as Tweetie, Tweetdeck, and Twhirl.  I believe we have a good chance since we still have the shortest URLs that can be found.  If you haven’t tried it yet, head on over to http://pd.am and shorten your important links!

Aside from Pixel Dreamer, I am also finishing up my studies at university.  Oddly enough, I will be receiving a BA in Philosophy of all things…nothing to do with web development.  I was in Computer Science for a long while, until I discovered web programming and realized that’s what I was really interested in.  At University of Maryland, they do not touch upon web programming languages in Comp-Sci, so I had to learned everything I know on my own, on my own time.  Having some Java programming experience did not hurt either .

Anyways, I am looking forward to the upcoming year, great things will happen with Pixel Dreamer.

Derek Kessler of PreCentral.net just disclosed some very interesting information on their blog.

Apparently, putting his Palm Pre, which so happens to have a Touchstone back cover, caused his MacBook Pro to go into sleep mode.  This is because Apple’s mechanism for sleep mode is initiated by magnets; so when Derek’s Pre hit the right palm rest of his MacBook – it turned off.

So this is just a reiterated warning from me, an owner of a Pre, to be careful where to place this little puppy.  Magnets do not play nice with computer electronics.  Until it is determined how strong these magnets are, refrain from placing the phone (Pre) anywhere near your computer.

Here is Derek’s explanation:

As you know, the Touchstone charger and associated induction back use built-in magnets to align and secure the Pre to the charger. The magnets on the charging “puck” are the more powerful of the sets, but those in the Pre’s back could be strong enough to cause problems if inadvertently placed. I write this post because this morning after I was awakened by my Pre’s daily alarm, I grabbed the phone, killed the alarm, grumbled on the way to my computer (a MacBook Pro that crunches numbers through the night), and then set the Pre on the right palm-rest area (no pun intended) of the laptop. To my bemusement, the computer immediately went into sleep mode. So I pushed the power button on the laptop, it turned back on, and after a second went back to standby. “This is odd,” I said to my empty living room, so I turned it on again. And it turned off again.

Oh wait – that’s right, the MacBook uses a magnet to activate sleep mode.  Whoops.  Although the magnets on the Touchstone battery door are fairly weak (far too weak to disrupt a hard drive, one hopes), I imagine that it’s possible that they could disrupt other bits and bobs in a way similar to what happened to my MacBook.

The first thing that comes to mind is credit cards and access/ID cards. Every credit card and most state/federal/corporate ID’s have a magnetic strip across the back that can be disrupted by magnetism. Thankfully, since these cards’ magnetic strips only need to be written once, they are what’s called high-coercivity strips and are thus not very coercive to magnetic interference (as tested by Mythbusters). But hotel room key cards are a different story; they use low-coercivity strips to allow easy and quick rewriting for new customers, and are thus prone to failure in the face of magnetism. You or somebody you know has had a hotel key card stop working and the only explanation you (and the front desk) could conjure was that your cell phone had killed it. Most cell phones don’t even have magnets and yet are capable of causing wanton key card destruction, let alone the low-but-powerful-enough magnets in the Touchstone back.

So I believe I have found a security hole in Google’s login systems, and why they need to unlink usernames with YouTube accounts, or they need to at least address this issue.  I’ll be brief.

Say you have a Google Account.  Say your other friend has a Google Account.  These two accounts are independent of each other, as in they have different User Names and Passwords.  Now, say that one of you, lets say here that its you, who creates a YouTube account to share with me.

This is a very common circumstance.  I have about 3 different accounts in YouTube that I share with other people, it makes it convenient to maintain the account, especially if its a busy one.

So here is the security hole: if I log into this ‘Shared” YouTube account, all I need to do is head on over to Gmail and waalaa! I’m now in your Gmail.  I have full access, and I can poke around all you want, without you knowing except for that little IP log at the bottom of the Gmail window.  I could do some real damage  and snooping.

This is a serious issue, please unlink the accounts.  Email is rarely shared, YouTube accounts are.

UPDATE: This is the response from Google about this issue.  Apparently these accounts were linked, and this is just the nature of the Google Accounts system.  I agree with the security team, there is no large risk, but this is still a problem in my opinion.

From Google:

Thank you for the clarification, and for helping me figure out the
nature of the problem.

As you noted, the user in fact disclosed his Google account password
to you, along with an “alias” on YouTube. This alias serves simply as
a nickname for his canonical account with Google, and the password
could be readily used to access services such as Google Mail or Google
Docs without the need to rely on YouTube at all.

Although the fact you gained access to all Google services by logging
in via YouTube with this alias may sound somewhat counterituitive to
people less accustomed to a variety of Google services, I believe
there is no security risk. As noted, you could have used the same
password, and his canonical account name, to simply log in at:

https://www.google.com/accounts/Login

…to gain access to the same services. Canonical account names are
not a secret, and could be easily discovered, e.g. through the YouTube
UI itself.

Now, it goes without saying that sharing your password with other
parties is usually not a good idea, for a number of reasons; if this
can’t be avoided, we would recommend creating a separate Google
account for this purpose.

My Short Rebuttal:

Absolutely Sir, I will add to my blog post now.  I have to say though, that it would not be a bad idea to give Google Account’s access permissions.  This would also prevent something confusing like this from happening.  The basic fact is, while your correct there is no large security risk, this user (my friend) had no intention, nor any indication (according to him) that he was allowing me to access his Gmail without his explicit consent.  Just something to consider…

I would like to praise Google right now, for their quick response time, and detail centered approach.  This encounter with them was exciting in its short life span.  Onward…