.@ Twitter syntax: What does it mean?

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You may have noticed some people you follow in Twitter beginning a tweet with ".@" and wondering what it means. Here's an example:

Adding a . in front of an @ symbol at the beginning of a tweet will make that tweet visible to your followers in their timelines. Otherwise, if you don't add a period in front of the @ symbol, it's treated as an @reply, which will not be seen in their timelines unless they are also following the account mentioned. In the above case, if Scott Kirsner didn't put a period immediately before @graiz, the only people who would have seen it in their timelines are people who happen to also be following @graiz.

Confused? I don't blame you. @replies are visible in search or when people click on your timeline, and when a Twitter name is mentioned anywhere else in the message in any scenario it will show up in your followers' timelines. But Twitter wanted to make sure that @replies were treated as Twitter syntax. At first, it was merely a convention that users adopted, like RT. The Twitter blog explains the convoluted tale ...

Why Ancestry.com is not enough

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"The real killer for me was that every search gave me zillions of irrelevant hits. That, together with a paucity of Scottish data, means that it is never going to be worth my while trying to use it."

This quote comes from an email sent to me by Ray Hennessy, an experienced genealogist in Scotland who maintains the What's In A Name website. He made this comment after reading my Ancestry.com review, and discussing with me some of the difficulties I have encountered building my own Lamont family tree (I am using his comment with permission).

When I heard this, I was not at all surprised. I've been working on my family tree off and on for the past 15 years, and am very familiar with the limitations of using databases (online and offline) to build out a family tree.

Lamont is a Scottish surname, and we confirmed the Scottish connection through family sources and public documents, including obituaries and birth records. I began using online sources for research in the 1990s, and tried Ancestry.com for the first time in 2008. I revisited Ancestry again late last year after receiving a trial offer that urged me to explore a new batch of U.S. military records that they had posted. The online military records were a huge waste of time. Despite easy access, I've had much more productive sessions in phone or face-to-face interviews with relatives, examining letters and photographs from family members, and visiting local government offices.

Ancestry.com and other online databases such as Rootsweb have been of limited use. The "zillions of irrelevant hits" problem is only part of the story. Other problems include an emphasis on censuses and other lists (ship registers, military rosters, etc.) as opposed to photographs, local histories, and trend data relating to health/immigration/economy. The databases also fail to provide mechanisms to connect or correlate names, despite statistical and algorithm-driven methods to piece together likely connections. Sometimes, family trees submitted by other people help connect the dots, but often the trees are poorly documented or contain significant errors.

But there's another issue at work here, too: A database is only as good as the data that's put into it. If you can exclude the irrelevant hits, an 1870 census record might be a starting point, but the best stuff is to be found in church registers, county historians' offices and the humble town clerk -- sources which are almost never digitized or shared online.

Image: Portion of a handwritten family tree kept on file in the Clinton County, NY, Historian's Office.

1000 followers on Twitter

It only took about 5 years, but my @ilamont account finally reached 1000 followers through entirely organic means. I'm kind of curious if the rate of followers will accelerate now that I've passed that threshhold, although part of me worries that the types of people who use it as a trigger are not the type I want as followers, anyway. It's all about quality, not quantity, folks.

Google Earth overlays

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In the past year, I have had a few chances to play with Google Earth and try out some of the amazing tools that come with the program. For the Social Television class I took at the MIT Media Lab, I used placemarks, 3D buildings, and zooming animation to create the software demo for our final project. More recently, I was able to use Google Earth to show Mass Craigslist maps that show the rough boundaries of the state's five Craigslist areas.

How did I make the different-colored areas in Google Earth? By using overlays. It's a drawing function that lets users trace points on a map with a mouse. Once the points are joined, the area looks filled in. Different colors and transparencies can be applied, which lets overlapping areas be clearly shown (see the Invantory blog post, above for an example of overlapping overlays).

Overlaps are an extremely useful tool. For instance, in the map below, I wanted to show Newton, Massachusetts, and nearby communities and commuter destinations using different-colored overlays. I basically hand-matched the inner overlay to the actual boundaries of Newton, which are a display option in Google Earth. The outer overlay was hand-drawn according to municipal boundaries as well as my own rough estimate of the area of downtown Boston that many Newton residents commute to every day:

Google Earth is a free download. I recommend using a reasonably recent and powerful desktop computer, as it uses lots of processing power to run and render sophisticated 3D images.

500,000 page views

Last month, one of my blogs passed a major milestone: 500,000 page views. The Statcounter report is here:

Some other relevant data about this figure: Statcounter has been measuring traffic on that blog since 2005 or 2006. I have been also running Google Analytics on the same blog, but it shows a lower figure -- about 400,000 page views for the same period but still shows about a quarter-million unique visitors (differences between the two tools are shown here). I've generated several thousand dollars in AdSense revenue from the blog over the years -- not enough to live on, but a welcome addition these days considering I have no other income from the classifieds startup that I cofounded.

These numbers may not be impressive. After all, some blogs may get that much Web traffic in a single month. But what I find so interesting is that well over half the traffic to Harvard Extended has come to the blog after I stopped updating it in late 2008. In other words, people still find great value in content that's between three and six years old. It may not be "fresh", but it's deep and relevant and useful to them (average time spent by each visitor is more than 90 seconds, according to Google Analytics).

Google, of course, has helped bring most of this traffic, either directly through search or indirectly through references from other blogs or news sites that were originally sourced via search. But there are also people who have bookmarked it, or know about it through reputation and remember the URL.

Huffington Post traffic shows Chrome on top

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Yesterday, one of my other blogs got a traffic spike, thanks to a link at the bottom of this Huffington Post article. It wasn't a lot of visitors (so far, about 120) but what I found remarkable was the breakdown of the browser traffic:

Half of the visits were from Chrome users? Safari beating out all flavors of IE by a 3:1 ratio? I see the Huffington Post as a generally tech-savvy crowd (they get their news from blogs, after all) but they are hardly early adopters -- more like early mainstream.

If this is a sign of things to come, watch out Microsoft ...

TMobile monthly 4G + Samsung Exhibit II = Android on the cheap

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I'm one of those cell phone cheapskates. You know, the guy who didn't own a mobile phone until it was absolutely necessary, and then only got the cheapest phone/plan options possible -- or got it through his employer. For the past few years, I have been using AT&T Go-phone/Pay-As-You-Go plans and the cheapo Nokia feature phones that come with them. A few weeks ago, however, I joined the elite, getting a snazzy Android phone (Samsung Exhibit II) and a really reasonable carrier plan -- the $30 TMobile Monthly 4G plan -- through Walmart. I'll give a quick review of the phone and the T-Mobile plan below.

First, a relevant fact to this review is that while I have been a cellphone cheapskate for a decade, I am actually a pretty heavy iOS user. I don't own an iPhone, but we have an iPad at home as well as two iPod touch devices. The newer one (4th generation) has been something that never leaves my side -- I use it for email, photos, twitter, Instagram, the Weather Channel app, music, and about a dozen other regular uses (I have wi-fi at home and work, which enables a pretty good mobile experience at these locations). If I had the funds to afford an $80 or $90 monthly iPhone plan through AT&T or Verizon, I would have gotten an iPhone, but I don't. But my work as co-founder of Invantory (a company that is developing a Craigslist app) was getting more intense and requires more frequent calling. This forced me to get a new phone plan with more capacity.

I began hearing about the TMobile Monthly4G plan in October, offered through Wal-Mart. It sounded great -- the cheapest option cost $30 per month, included unlimited texting and Web (first 5G at 4G speeds, 2G thereafter) and 100 minutes of talk, with 10 cents per minute thereafter.

This worked out to be far better than the AT&T GoPhone plan, which costs $25 for 100 minutes of talk and charges 25 cents for additional minutes. AT&T texting is 20 cents and data is similarly expensive and practically unusable on the tiny Nokia browser and terrible e-mail interface. Virgin reportedly had a similar plan to T-Mobile, but it was $5 more per month.

T-Mobile/WalMart offered a bunch of different phones, but I was really set on Android -- it was an iPhone-like experience and will eventually become a platform for Invantory's mobile classifieds. T-Mobile had an Android phone called the Samsung Dart, but it had poor reviews (including poor voice quality). The Samsung Exhibit II, however, sounded much better, and worked with the new monthly4G plan.

The plan had just been launched, so I began visiting local Wal-marts to look for the phone and try it out. It was useless. The boxed phones for the Tmobile Monthly 4G plan were there, but they were feature phones and the Dart. The Exhibit II wasn't in stock, and staff had no idea what I was talking about (even in a store which the Walmart website listed as having it "in stock"). The phone was also supposed to be available through T-Mobile stores, but at a 25% markup ($250 vs $200 in Walmart). I eventually gave up seeing the phone in person and just ordered it online through Walmart.com.

Out of the box, the phone worked well, but there were some hiccups. Here's the low down:

Activation and voice service

• Activation via live T-Mobile customer service is a problem if you want the $30 plan -- for some reason the reps only have another $30 plan (1500 talk and text, see screenshot below) and will direct you to register online if you want the 100 minutes talk/unlimited Web & text.
• It didn't seem to be a problem to get a phone number in my area code (I mention this because a long time ago it used to be an issue with new mobile phones, or you'd be assigned a phone in the 857 area code)
• Even though T-Mobile apparently charges minutes against some plan users who make calls on their Wifi signals. "Wifi Calling" is not counted against the Monthly4G plan minutes -- I talked with a customer service representative to confirm this. After conducting a test, I determined that Wifi Calling is counted against your minutes, and another T-Mobile rep confirmed this (contradicting what the first one said). Therefore, I advise turning off Wifi calling and putting the load on the T-Mobile network. You're paying for it either way, might as well make T-Mobile work for it and reconsider their policy. 
• The Exhibit II has a excellent voice quality, and I have yet to have a dropped call.
• 4G coverage seems reasonably good in and around the Boston area, even on some subway lines (MBTA Red Line, but not the Green Line)

Exhibit II hardware

• The Exhibit II is a very lightweight phone that has a somewhat slippery plastic case -- it will easily fall out of loose pockets when you are sitting down.
• The processor is adequate, but I have noticed that sometimes it hangs (especially if you are awakening it from sleep with an app already open).
• Storage is paltry compared to my 4th-generation iPod touch -- USB storage is listed as 1.6 GB, and device memory >800 MB. It's not a problem for people who don't have a lot of media on their phones, but if you are a heavy music, photo, or video user you will have to get an SD card.
• The battery seems to charge fast. However, I generally have to charge it once every 36 hours 15 hours, leaving it on all the time with relatively low voice usage and high "other" usage (surfing, camera, apps, email, etc.). Update: Battery life seems to be getting worse as time goes on. Part of this relates to the fact that I am using more apps and talking more often on it, but it seems the decline is excessive, even though I am shutting off GPS and often disabling Wifi (note: Disabling wifi apparently increases battery usage, owing to the fact that the device is constantly searching for 4G signals. I've found the best tactic is to leave wifi on all day). The batteries in my iPod touches are far more resilient after many thousands of hours of heavy wifi, app, and camera use.
• Screen quality: Excellent! At 480 x 800, the dimensions are slimmer than the iPod touch (640 x 960 pixels), but the resolution seems comparable.
• Photo syncing via USB doesn't work with my two-year-old iMac and iPhoto. But sharing to Dropbox from photo app on the Exhibit II partially makes up for that problem.
• The Wifi receiver is adequate, with slightly less range than the iPod touch. Switching between Wifi/Edge/3G/4G happens in the background and works well.

Camera

This is probably my biggest beef with the phone. Here are the pros and cons:

• The resolution of both the front-facing and rear-facing cameras are acceptable and superior to my 4th generation iTouch. 
• The flash works very well in low-light settings. 
• But the lag for shooting is sometimes as long as two seconds, which makes setting up shots of people and moving objects difficult and irritating. Auto-focus is apparently to blame, and it can't be turned off (although you can switch to a pretty nice macro setting). 
• There is no "camera+" or Instagram app for the phone, which is a big negative for someone coming from the iOS universe.
• The other problem is color -- reds and oranges are definitely muted, as you may be able to see from the photo below. The wood floor actually has a richer color, and the red and yellow legos are a very bright, child-friendly color in reality (the reds below should be fire-engine red, but they're not). The blues, meanwhile, are too strong -- in this photo the detail on the blue boxes can't be seen from afar because the color is so intense.

Android Software

• Once you get used to Android (my Exhibit II came installed with Android 2.3.5 "Gingerbread") it's a wonderful platform. But getting used to some of the quirks takes time. There are other negatives, too, which I will detail first.
• "Settings", "My Accounts" and "Accounts and Sync" and individual app settings contain overlapping information and controls. It can be hard to find what you are looking for, and difficult to do certain things such as turning off notification sounds (although there is a "Sound Settings" option, it does not control all sound settings -- you'll have to root around in various apps to turn everything off). 
• For other settings, I still haven't figured out to adjust them -- such as turning off or changing the startup/power down sounds. How do you turn off the "recharged" sound, so it doesn't wake you up in the middle of the night? I have no idea. iOS is far superior, centralizing all system settings and many app settings in a single place ("Settings"), and making it very easy to disable all sounds.
• To get carriers to adopt Android, Google made it customizable to a certain extent. The result: Most American carriers, including T-Mobile, load up their phones with crapware which apparently can't be deleted. I got T-Mobile TV HD, T-Mobile Mall, Kies Air, Blio, Yelp, an antivirus program, "Bonus Apps", and bunch of other stuff I didn't want and cluttered up my screens. As it is apparently impossible or difficult to delete them, I had to create a special screen to hold them. Apple forces carriers to stay away from the crapware  practice and allows people to easily delete apps and files, which makes iOS far superior for new users. 
• Android confusingly has separate "Home" and "Apps" screens, both of which can be customized. iOS only has one view, and allows you to place files and Web bookmarks on it, giving it the same prominence as apps.  
• Apps: Android does not win on quality (as a more open system, there are a lot of crappy apps out there) but the process of downloading, installing, and trying out the apps is much faster -- no need to enter an iTunes password each time or hunt for the app once it's installed.
• Email: Android's default email app looks better and seems to work faster than iOS on wifi. My only complaint is "mark as unread" is not available (it is, however, an option in the Android Gmail app). 
• Sync: I've always felt that iOS syncing (and now iCloud) is imperfect. I'll set stuff up, such as Google calendar, and it doesn't seem to get imported into my iPod's Calendar app. But Android really rocks -- you can even attach and group Facebook and twitter accounts, which makes for a better Contacts list. 
• Customization: If you can find the right options, you can do some pretty neat things, such as setting up live wallpapers that move (a swirling galaxy is one of the defaults). iOS will surely catch up, though.
• Keyboard and voice input: The Android keyboard is not as good as the one on iOS devices. This is partially the result of the Exhibit's narrower screen, but I also find myself having to "aim" a little high to press the right character. On the other hand, voice input integrated into the keyboard is superb. Just press the microphone on the keyboard (or next to the search magnifying glass), speak clearly, and you'll see it entered. It may not compare to Siri, but considering Siri is not available on most iPhones or any iPods, I'd say Android has the upper hand at the low end of the market.

I may have some other updates as time goes on and I use the phone more. But so far, so good.

Screenshot: Current TMobile Monthly 4G rates: