Although technology and the Internet have taken a beating in the past for potentially limiting people's social interaction, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found that the opposite might be true.
According to a Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey, which polled 2,512 adults, the dawn of new technology and the Internet has not caused people to withdraw from society. In fact, the study found that "the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then." Pew said that 6 percent of the entire U.S. adult population currently has "no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be 'especially significant' in their life."
That said, Pew did find that Americans' "discussion networks"--a measure of people's "most important social ties"--have shrunk "by about a third since 1985" from three people to two. However, Pew found no evidence to suggest that it had anything to do with mobile phones or the Internet. In fact, the organization's study found that mobile-phone use and active Web participation yields "larger and more diverse core discussion networks."
Social media is also helping people expand their social interaction. According to Pew, those who use the Internet frequently "are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race." Users who share photos online are more likely to discuss political topics with someone of a different party, the organization found.
Do you know your neighbor?
Frequent Web users are more likely to communicate with neighbors in person than those who don't use the Web as often, Pew found. In fact, 61 percent of respondents said that they talk to a neighbor at least once per month. The study also found that bloggers are 72 percent "more likely to belong to a local voluntary association" than those who don't blog.
Perhaps most important, Pew found that just because someone is a heavy Web user, that doesn't mean they remove themselves from traditional social activities like visiting a restaurant or hanging out at a bar on a Friday night. According to the study, Web users are "45 percent more likely to visit a cafe, 52 percent more likely to visit a library, 34 percent more likely to visit a fast-food restaurant, 69 percent more likely to visit other restaurants, and 42 percent more likely to visit a public park." Later on, the study reported that social-networking users "are 40 percent more likely to visit a bar, but 36 percent less likely to visit a religious institution."
So, next time your grandmother tells you that the Web is ruining the world, you might want to tell her to check out Pew's study. For more on these figures and many more, click here.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Google on Monday will begin giving users a new way to use their existing mobile phone number with parts of its Google Voice service.
No, it's not a full number port, which the company still says is coming and will eventually allow things like call screening, conference calling, or listening into a call before picking up--all with your existing number. Instead, Google is taking advantage of conditional call forwarding to let users send unanswered calls to Google's voice-mail service in place of the one provided by a user's carrier.
Once sent to Google, those voice messages are transcribed, then made available for playback and review online, or as an SMS message. Users can also take advantage of Google Voice's customized greeting service to give callers a different voice-mail greeting depending on what number they're calling from.
Google Voice users can now choose to use their own number, or take one of Google's.
(Credit: Google/CNET)In order to use the new service, a one-time setup is required, which has both new and existing Google Voice users walk through a wizard that asks for their mobile number and what carrier they're on. It then offers up the special numeric code they have to dial to enable conditional forwarding from their handset to Google Voice.
For users who have a Google Voice number in the same account as their existing mobile phone number, it will be business as usual; Google Voice's voice-mail section will denote which number it was from. Google Voice's senior product manager, Vincent Paquet, explained to me that this system has been designed so users don't have to make any tough choices about which number they want to use. It will also allow users to sign up to Google Voice without having to register a new number.
Smartphone users with visual voice-mail services (such as the iPhone) may find that these extra features aren't enough to warrant making the switch. However, users with older handsets are likely to find Google's offer enticing since it enables them to manage voice-mails both from their phone and on the Web.
The deal is made even sweeter by the fact that all major U.S. carriers are on board, Paquet says. This may come as a surprise to some, considering that just last month, Google, Apple, and AT&T clashed quite publicly over the rejection of Google's Voice application from Apple's App Store in July. But with this new service, Google is merely playing by each carrier's rules, using a feature that's long been available as a way for users to pass on calls they cannot take. There's also some serious potential for carriers to generate extra income in SMS fees for transcribed voice-mail messages that users would have otherwise spent just a minute or so listening to from their phones.
Google Voice remains in private beta, although earlier this month Google began putting invites into the in-boxes of its users, allowing them to invite their friends.
Although iPhone owners have an easy time getting ringtones for their devices through Apple's iTunes store, the rest of the market can't easily find unique ringtones for their phones.
As someone who has suffered from that issue, I decided to take a look at several ringtone-creation services. Check them out to see if one will do what you need.
Make some ringtones
Audiko: I'm a stickler for good design on the Web. I think it's one of the most important elements of any site. And that's precisely why I didn't like Audiko at first glance. It's ugly. But once I actually used Audiko, my opinion changed quickly.
Audiko is like many of the services in this roundup. You can upload an MP3 file, pick your favorite 30-second span, and have the site create a ringtone for you. Once it's ready, you can have it sent to your phone. The site supports messages to phones on most major carriers. You can also opt to download the MP3 file to your computer. The whole process is free.
But the most compelling feature Audiko boasts is the ability to take a clip from a YouTube video. The site allows you to input the video's link. It then downloads it, analyzes the audio, and lets you choose which part of it you want to be your ringtone. It was a great feature. And like the other uploads on the site, it took no time to create the desired clip.
Audiko helps you find the portion of a song you want.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Mobile17: Mobile17's design is great. The amount of content you can access is outstanding. But unfortunately, it takes too long to get the ringtone.
When you first get to Mobile17, you have the option of downloading popular songs that users have recently turned into ringtones. To do so, the site links you to Amazon's MP3 Store. If you already have an MP3 that you want to turn into a ringtone, you can upload the track and pick the portion of the song you want. It's after that that Mobile17 breaks down a little.
To get your ringtone, Mobile17 requires you to register for the site. Once complete, you'll find that it takes a long time to get your ringtone sent to your phone. In fact, when I picked a clip in a song I wanted, the site told me that it would take 43 minutes to get it. That was the single issue with Mobile17, but it was a big one. At least the site is free and it works with your iPhone.
Mobile 17 will help you pick the clip you want.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
I remember a time when making ringtones used to be a very cumbersome experience. My technique of choice was to use the open-sourced Audacity then do various conversions in iTunes or Quicktime Pro by tweaking some of the advanced settings. However, the Web has spawned newer, less tedious methods. On of them, Audiko, is a particularly well-done effort, letting you grab audio tracks from your hard drive or the Web and customize them for use on your mobile phone.
While I think ringtones of popular songs are largely annoying and superfluous, the tools to create them are actually quite fun. Audiko simply layers the entire track on one timeline, while giving you a magnified area for each minute of the song to manipulate up to a 40-second ringtone from the segment of your choice. The entire editor is overlaid on a waveform of the song, and you can toggle whether or not you want a fade on the in and out, which can be helpful if your phone doesn't automatically do it for you.
When you're all finished creating your pocket masterpiece you've got three simple download options. One will save it as a normal mp3 ringtone compatible on most major handsets, as well as an option to download the .m4r iPhone-compatible ringtone--something you normally need an application like iToner or GarageBand (both Mac-only apps) to create. There's also a WAP-friendly URL to simply grab the audio file on your handset without having to sync to your desktop. Whatever you've created gets put into a pool of other songs, and you can even see and download other ringtones from the same artist that have been created by other users when you're all done.
See also:
Bring the canaries, we're going ToneMining
3Guppies gets media to your mobile
Pocketfuzz: Create your own ringtones, sort of
Edit MP3 tracks into ringtones for your phone without software or visual distractions using Audiko.
(Credit: CNET Networks)For years now, the popular virtual world, Second Life has been available only for PCs, Macs, and Linux machines.
There has always been talk about whether SL might ever make it onto consoles like the Xbox or PlayStation 3 and some scattered discussion about possible mobile phone implementations.
Last year, in fact, I saw a hack that allowed someone to access SL, albeit in a very, very superficial manner, on an iPhone.
But now, according to a press release I got Tuesday morning, a company called Vollee is planning on releasing technology that will make it possible to run Second Life on 3G handsets via Vollee's streaming media service.
I have to admit, I'm skeptical. Second Life is difficult to use, is very graphics intensive, and requires a huge amount of streaming data. To run it on a 3G network might work, I suppose, but it would depend entirely on that network staying up, staying high-speed, and on the device being capable of presenting the SL environment in a pleasing, useful manner.
Or not. I suppose it's also possible that someone could use Second Life on a handset and not need all the graphics. Essentially, it could be little more than a communications medium, allowing users to chat with their SL friends, to move around to various locations, and to do some small tasks. Would they be able to use the building tools? I doubt it.
Basically, this is a workaround. I haven't seen it, though, so I can't say for sure. But given the constraints that SL presents, I'm just not sure how well it translates, even onto a device with a big screen and a high-speed connection.
Still, it's noteworthy that this company is trying, and that it got someone from Linden Lab, the publisher of Second Life, to offer a quote for the release. That implies coordination between the two companies, and that always makes something like this more likely to have been thought out.
But only time will tell.
Update (5:19pm): I went over to the Game Developers Conference this afternoon and got a look at Vollee's mobile SL implementation. And I have to say, I was impressed.
While the mobile version won't allow users--at least at first--to conduct any kinds of transactions or to use the building tools, what they have got already is pretty cool.
Mostly, it's because what they've built is fairly smooth, and the look and feel is consistent with the original version, albeit much smaller.
But, for example, the graphics--say, when you're flying--look right, as it does when instant messaging with someone in-world or looking at your contacts list.
This is clearly the result of an actual partnership with Linden Lab rather than a do-it-yourself type of workaround, like the one I saw last year.
And while this is no substitute for a fully working version, it's certainly enough for what many SL users do on a daily basis.
Google is ready to unveil a suite of software for mobile phones based on open-source technology, backed by some of the largest wireless industry companies in the world.
The company is expected to hold a press conference on Monday to unveil the project, which is expected to incorporate software from the Linux world into a mobile platform code-named Android that's designed to run on phones, according to sources familiar with Google's plans. A software development kit for what's being called "a complete mobile-phone software stack" is believed to be in the works and will be released relatively soon thereafter, the sources said. It's not exactly clear what kind of software will come as part of that stack, but it's said to include everything you need to run a phone.
Japanese wireless carriers KDDI and NTT DoCoMo are said to be heavily involved in what will be called the Open Handset Alliance, according to other sources. The rest of the more than 30 other companies involved reads like a who's-who list of the mobile-computing industry, including Qualcomm, Broadcom, HTC, Intel, Samsung, Motorola, Sprint, and Texas Instruments.
Don't expect to see a Google phone, or Gphone, on store shelves anytime soon. And in such a large project with so many different players, plans and some details could still change over the weekend. It's unclear when the final version will be released. Google has repeatedly declined to talk about the Gphone or confirm the Monday event.
Persistent rumors of Google's interest in the mobile-phone market have captivated Silicon Valley and the wireless industry for months. The company's interest appears to be simple: there are more than a billion mobile phones in the world, and sales show no signs of slowing down.
Over time, these mobile phones are going to become more and more sophisticated, and the race to develop a truly mobile computer is wide open. Google has the engineering talent to make a concerted push into this area while keeping rivals like Microsoft at bay, and it has enough resources to force the industry to take it seriously, despite its relative lack of experience in the market.
Mobile phones are just starting to move beyond the stripped-down mobile Internet and join the party with their bigger PC cousins. When they get there, they'll need search, and they'll need applications tailored to mobile phones. Those are things Google figured out how to do a long time ago.
And when you've got practically unlimited amounts of money, finding the things you don't have is somewhat easier. Android was the name of a mobile-phone software company acquired by Google in 2005 and led by Andy Rubin, the co-founder of Danger. It was never entirely clear what Android was working on, but it appears to be coming to fruition.
The open-source community appears to be contributing a lot of technology to Android. Google is expected to license Android under the Apache License, Version 2.0, according to sources.
Wind River Systems, a company that specializes in tailoring Linux for embedded devices such as network equipment and mobile phones, is likely to be a key part of the alliance, sources familiar with the effort said. The company is expected to play a role in working on a Linux foundation for Google, integrating it with specific hardware, and providing support to phone companies using the software.
A Wind River representative declined to comment Friday on any Google partnership.
Wind River previously was fond mostly of its own operating system, VxWorks, but it got Linux religion in 2003, and Linux has been a top priority for Chief Executive Ken Klein.
But Linux in mobile phones has been a tough proposition for multicompany consortia over the years. Among those that have tackled the challenge are the Linux Phone Standard (Lips) Forum, the Open Source Developer Labs, the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF), and most recently, the LiMo Foundation founded in 2006.
The Google group is separate from LiMo, but the two share many members, and a connection could be beneficial. Linux-based phone software for Google could dovetail with LiMo's work, providing mobile phone software developers with a unified software foundation.
Mobile phones can't run just any software. Battery life is paramount, and therefore software must be designed to run inside a constrained environment with limited amounts of memory and processing power at its disposal. Linux appeals to phone makers because it's modular, meaning that it's relatively easy to piece together only the technology you need, and its relatively cheap to acquire the parts.
Also, phones are complicated, at least as they compare to PCs. ARM's chip designs are at the heart of almost every mobile phone in the world, but those cores get implemented in very different ways by partners such as Samsung and Texas Instruments, and ensuring application compatibility across multiple phones is a difficult undertaking.
The key to Google's software, however, will be how it's accepted by the public. People are drawn to sleek hardware, but they spend the majority of their time working with software. That's where an attachment is formed with a computer, and that attachment is particularly strong with a device you would carry with you everywhere you go. No details were immediately available as to the look and feel of the software.
Word of the pending Google news had reached JumpTap, a competitor to Google in the mobile ads space that is not included in the announcement.
"I'm not sure if it's an industry-supported event or a Google trap" to get developers to write to Google software, said Dan Olschwang, chief executive of JumpTap. "If it is really open source and the mobile-phone manufacturers will adopt it, it will be a major industry-changing event."
Google isn't just looking to expand its ad monetization technology to new platforms, but also to shake up the telecommunications industry and its "walled garden" approach that limits what handsets, carriers, and services consumers can use, industry experts said.
"Google's stated open-source approach, or open net approach to life, is antithetical to the way cellular carriers look at the world," said Tim Hanlon, an executive vice president at Denuo, a consulting arm of advertising agency Publicis Groupe. Carriers are "loath to separate device from service. They're loath to let third-party applications play on their proprietary network."
If Google succeeds in opening up the industry it will be the biggest thing the search company has done in the last couple of years, said Stephen Arnold, author of The Google Legacy and a new book, Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. "The phone companies "don't understand the business Google is in, and now they're talking to them!"
And the company could very well have a trump card to play, if it follows through on its interest in the 700MHz spectrum auction scheduled for January 2008.
Can Google really be a mobile-software developer, search engine, application house, and wireless carrier? And will people actually want to use that? We might soon find out.
News.com's Stephen Shankland and Elinor Mills contributed to this report.
David Goldfarb's phone won't stop ringing.
The Vringo CTO is giving me a demo of Vringo's video ringtone service, now in public beta, to demonstrate how users can assign phone-formatted video clips as their outgoing ringtones. David has chosen a humorous singing cartoon of a green bear as his video calling card. He's set it up so that any phone he calls with a Vringo client will light up with his chosen video. If so desired, he could limit the output to his wife and send everyone else a much more sober video to announce his call.
Vringo reverses the conventional ringtone concept of users choosing songs to differentiate between contacts, entertain themselves with favorite songs, or make a stylistic statement. Here individuals control how they're perceived by friends, and can use "vringos" as a gift or personalized greeting. Users can upload their own clips on Vringo.com or record clips from within the Vringo phone app. It's easy to see how users could create happy birthday messages or video gifts.... Read more
The only things you need to send a Facebook photo to any cell phone are 3Guppies' (review) Facebook app and a working U.S. or Canadian phone number. The app does a curious thing, pulling up all the photos in your friends' albums as well as your own. Grabbing the photo previews it in a mobile screen frame, though you needn't worry too much about it fitting--3Guppies Mobile automatically scales photos on the destination phone.
You can crop, title, and tag the image and choose to store a copy in the 3Guppies locker for later reference if you have or sign up for an account. Once the photo has landed on the phone, it can be downloaded or sent on its way to sunnier pastures. 3Guppies has hustled behind the scenes, striking compatibility deals with 28 carriers for 1,200 phones in North America.
MySpace users have a slightly different product, an embeddable photo album widget that's then linked to your phone number. Once associated, photo, video, and text auto-uploads from your phone to the widget, essentially creating a miniature multimedia blogging platform. You can also send MySpace photos to any phone.
Like many of the products showcased at the CTIA Wireless Conference, 3Guppies plans to invite ad support, but that's a good three months out and CEO John Dearborn isn't entirely sure how traditional or creative the ads will end up. They may surface as small banners on a WAP site or as a simple link, or could manifest as more interesting sponsored skins surrounding an activity window.
3Guppies Mobile app sends any friend's Facebook photo to any phone.
(Credit: CNET Networks)SAN FRANCISCO--One area where Sun Microsystems' Java caught on was in mobile phones, but a leader of the project is working to eventually replace the mobile-specific version of the software.
Sun Vice President James Gosling speaks in May at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET News.com)Java Standard Edition (SE), geared for desktop computers, will gradually supplant Java Micro Edition (ME) as technology improvements let more computing power be packed into smaller devices, said James Gosling, the Sun vice president often called the father of Java.
"We're trying to converge everything to the Java SE specification. Cell phones and TV set-top boxes are growing up," Gosling said at a Java media event here Wednesday. "That convergence is going to take years."
The prime example of the trend is Sun's own JavaFX Mobile, software Sun got through its SavaJe acquisition and which the company hopes mobile phone makers will embrace. JavaFX Mobile includes almost all of Java SE, though it's missing a few pieces such as CORBA (brace yourself: Common Object Request Broker Architecture) for getting software to work with other programs across a network.
Sun's Java expectation dovetails with recent trends, most notably Apple's iPhone, which architecturally is much more an Apple computer writ small than a mobile phone writ large. In particular, Apple uses a version of its regular Safari Web browser so users will have as much of the desktop Internet experience as possible.
At the same time, Intel is working to bring x86 processors that run PCs into mobile gadgets. It's in cohoots with open-source efforts including Ubuntu Mobile and Mobile Firefox .
The move to Java SE won't happen overnight. Rich Green, Sun's executive vide president of software, said he expects smart phones using various pared-down versions of Java to stay in the market for at least a decade.
But the shift already was under way. "All the work in Java ME had been pushing it closer and closer to Java SE," Gosling said.
Defragmenting mobile Java
Moving to Java SE could help fix one nagging problem with Java ME: fragmentation.
Java ME is a collection of abilities--basic ones and higher-level options layered on top--each defined by a detailed description called a Java specification request. For Java ME, there are a large number of these JSRs for various features. That posed a challenge to Java's original tagline, "write once, run anywhere."
The tagline came about because a program written in Java could in principle run on any computer that had a Java virtual machine. The JVM is a software foundation that lets a generic Java program run on a particular computer. But with the multiplicity of Java ME extensions, there was often little guarantee that a program written for one mobile phone would work on another.
Java SE has a much richer basic set of abilities, so using it instead of Java ME could at least in principle restore some of Java's promise of software portability.
JavaFX mobile is one component of a multipronged effort called JavaFX that Sun announced in May at its JavaOne conference.
"JavaFX is probably the largest and most complex software engineering effort Sun has ever done," Gosling said. Here's a quick tour of the JavaFX components:
Tour de Java FX jargon
Unless you're a serious Java nerd, and maybe even if you are, Sun's latest nomenclature is a crazy hodge-podge of terms. Java SE--OK, that's been around for nearly a decade, we can handle it. Though there was some numbering madness a few years ago, Sun seems to have settled on the current version being Java SE 6. But let's work outward from there.
First comes Java 6 Update N, formerly called the Consumer Java Runtime Environment (JRE). This is an attempt to make Java SE easier on the average computer user, chiefly through improvements to the plug-in that Web browsers use to deal with Web pages using Java.
Among the Update N features: It preloads Java when the computer boots to avoid the excruciating delay when you encounter a Java Web page. It installs faster by loading only a bare-minimum kernel--typically less than 4MB--that gets things started and then updates itself with the full 12MB Java software collection. It takes advantage of Windows' Direct3D graphics abilities. And it includes a more graphically modern user interface that gives a unified look across multiple operating system.
Update N should go into beta testing in December and be available a few months later, said Chet Haase, Sun's Java SE client architect.
Atop Update N comes JavaFX Script. This is a new scripting language geared specifically for fancy user interface actions such as transparency and other effects that are difficult with the prevailing Web browser scripting language, JavaScript (which contrary to what its name may imply isn't based on Java). JavaFX Script is geared toward use more by design types than engineers, Gosling said.
Of course, you can't have a script without something to understand it. Thus there's JavaFX compiler to translate people's code into instructions the computer can execute.
Last is the aforementioned Java FX Mobile. This software is in part a reaction to gripes by Java ME developers who wanted a more unified foundation, Gosling said. Another difference compared to Java ME is that Sun will deliver it as a prewritten binary program; Java ME typically comes as source code that programmers must compile into something useful.
Potshots at the competition
Gosling and Java have been at the vanguard of an idea that in a way is just coming back into vogue: rich Internet applications, which is software that runs in a Web browser but comes with a lot more pizzazz and capability than bland Web pages.
Java caught on as a way to run server software and to run games on mobile phones, but one original promise of Java was turning a Web browser into a foundation for sophisticated software. (If you're having flashbacks to Netscape taking on Microsoft Windows and the resulting federal antitrust case, just breathe deeply for a moment to settle down.)
But much of the rich Internet application action is happening with software such as Ajax, the Adobe Integrated Runtime (nee Apollo) and Microsoft's Silverlight and Google Gears.
Gosling thinks JavaFX has a chance, too, though, listing several advantages he believes it has: a richer user interface, faster performance, a robust and well accepted language and better abilities when a computer is disconnected from a network.
And security, he adds. Adobe's AIR is designed to let programs work like regular PC software, but Gosling thinks the approach unwise. "It's a petri dish for viruses. Security is really hard to implement well."
If you're looking for another way to read Web content on your mobile phone, there's a new solution called Mippin that will let you browse and sort through popular Web feeds about as easily as you can using a desktop RSS browser. The service was created to tackle the problem of so many sites not offering a "mobile" version for cell phone users.
Browse your feeds by favicon, or the top stories voted on by the Mippin community.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Mippin serves a variety of feeds, which can be browsed and sorted by genre. You can also search by URL, and the service will do its best to convert the content into something resembling a story, with images in the right places. Unlike Google Reader's stark text approach, Mippin goes a little more visual, taking whatever pictures are on a post and adding them as a thumbnail next to the headline. It's a pleasing effect, and makes browsing headlines a little more enjoyable--similar to what Reddit Media has done on its site. The service supports itself through small text ads that bookend some of the feed directories and stories, but you won't find any annoying banners, click-through links, or story interruptions.
The real draw to the site is its directory, which is truly massive. There's page after page of links to good content. You can save the feeds you like to your "My Mippin" section, and share any particular story via e-mail or SMS. There's also an option to send it to Twitter, which unfortunately sends the Mippin-ized version of the story instead of its original link. In addition to its directory, the service also keeps track of what stories and feeds are getting the most play, and promotes them on the start page. You can also vote on a site's feed as being good or bad. The highest ranked sites have their own separate listing from the categories section, complete with a percentage of how many readers liked the feed.
Is Mippin that much better than Google Reader mobile when it comes to feeds? I'm not completely sold. While Mippin makes browsing a little more appealing, Google Reader still trumps Mippin by showing you what you haven't read, along with quick snippets of the article to help you decide whether to click on it. Google Reader also gives you a few more sharing options, depending on what the origin site offers, and shows you are any story comments. Nonetheless, I'm digging Mippin's approach--it's very fresh, clean, and useful, if you're looking to get some reading done on the go.
See also: Mowster, Bloglines Mobile, NextBlast ,NewsGator Mobile
[via Blognation]
