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MS Youth-Culture App Gets Gushy Advance Reviews
geo writes "Newsweek first reported this new Microsoft beta, threedegrees. The surprise is, Steven Levy, well-known fan of the Macintosh (and unfan of Microsoft) wrote something almost entirely positive. So did CNET news.com.com.com.com.com. Is it possible that something good is coming out of Redmond?"
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
has been trying to develop products aimed at the "Net generation," or young people currently between the ages of about 13 and 24.
With software that can do long distance meetings, and share files and photos, it would be a great business tool for brainstorming sessions, project planning, etc. It would also be great for distance learning applications and study groups. More and more colleges are doing Internet based classes these days, especially in doctoral programs. Too bad They didn't have those in my day..
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
"Is it possible that something good is coming out of Redmond?"
Uh. I know that MS bashing is second nature here and all...
However I really enjoy using XP. I enjoy using my Intellimouse Explorer. I enjoy several Microsoft games.
I appreciate having people out there who watch every step MS makes. However I think it's taking it a bit far to imply that MS NEVER does anything right.
Remember, Nobody cares whether you hate Microsoft or not.
Nobody cares whether you were offended by the poster's tone with regards to Microsoft.
Please, talk about the subject of the fucking post for a change.
Just RTFA and I cringed when I saw the bit about the instant sharing of files and images to the entire group. Crap like this is going to play havoc with business networks.
Also it seems to me that MS is getting a little confused, aren't they meant to be sucking up to the RIAA? If so whats with the music sharing?
Take a look at Avril or at Blink 42. These are not people from a generation who wants to adhere to society. Consider the following quote from the article:
;)
>>>
After much negotiation, the labels OK'd musicmix, once Microsoft agreed to somewhat hobble its features. (Playlists have a maximum of 60 tunes, and the songs won't play unless the original owner is participating.)
This is not how it goes. While this stuff might be interesting for the 8-12 year olds, beyond that they will be savy enough to figure out how to do things on their own.
MS while the intention is good is also misdirected. They want to get AOL IM client back. Last I remember the teens do not seem to use AOL since, well, its, for old geezers.... You know those that cannot use a computer
If MS were to stop worrying about the legal implications and stopped looking over their shoulder then maybe this 3degrees will be popular....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
No thanks.
In the case of MSN Messenger, they're using existing protocols and applications - which, in the spirit of code re-use, is a good thing.
Since MSN Messenger is for windows, that would explain the Windows requirement (although admitidally no 2000?). SP1 is an interesting one - maybe something in it is required - or maybe they're just using it to presuade people to run the fix. I don't know.
Finally the P2P update. Well that makes sense really.
I know this is a pro-Linux, anti-Microsoft site (you can say what you like to disagree but the comments made by the owners are definately that way and the icons imply the same) but come on, if the requirements had been:
Requires Linux 2.5.62 with KDE 3.0 and peer-to-peer upgrade.
(with the subtitling that it doesn't run on windows)
Would someone have made exactly the same comment?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
...see, previously, P2P was controlled by those meddling kids. But if MS can become the maker of the biggest, coolest, easiest to use P2P sharing system... and wait, aren't they also trying to become the makers of the biggest DRM system? Could there be some synergy between those two things??
It... it's too horrible to think about... yet...
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
No the first twenty replies would have gone along the lines of "KDE? Why would you use that Gnome is way better" "No its not" "Yes it is" "Well you suck" and so on and so on.
Never underestimate the geek ability to concentrate on the minute at the expense of the bigger issue.
Actually I just realized they might be "small webcasters" or internet rados, and they might have to conform to the rules recently established...
In the end what's the difference between shoutcasting to 10 friends or threedegreeing to 10 friends?
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
While I think that three degrees seems in theory like a community building tool, what worries me is the limit to 10 participants in a "posse" will create in groups.
Unless you can join multiple "posses," and what I read doesn't seem to suggest it, your going to have groups of ten or less which get to decide who can join.
In MSNM there is not set limit to the number of people you can chat with, and you could make one on one connections. Before you could ignore a person, now you can exclude them. And if it's intended to be for 13 to 14 year olds, I think social cliques are inevitable. This fails to mention those who can't participate fully in the program, which seems to require broadband for what I personally view as the most interesting aspect, the ability to listen to shared music.
I'm not bashing on Redmond on this. I honestly think that the basic idea of the program is meritorious, but by limiting users to ten per group, and (and I could be wrong) users to one group, the collaborative aspects are blunted.
Gryftir
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
Most IM systems are OS agnostic. Do you think MS will publish their protocol?
Finally the P2P update. Well that makes sense really.
It only makes sense when everything is "part of the operating system," i.e. it doesn't make sense since this P2P stuff is used only for three degrees. It may be a good idea to have a P2P OS service in the long run, but P2P protocols really haven't standardized. IIRC Clay Shirky had a good article about lack of standardization being a good thing right now.
Requires Linux 2.5.62 with KDE 3.0 and peer-to-peer upgrade. (with the subtitling that it doesn't run on windows) Would someone have made exactly the same comment?
No, because in all likelihood the Linux app would be open source and not subject to all this proprietary vendor lock in bullshit that MS is famous for.
-Kevin
Is it just me...
Or is this just IRC with a pretty GUI, integrated shoutcast and a channel limit of 10?
Need to get away?
Adirondack Vacations
Actually XP is pretty good on the stabilty front. I've had a few crashes but they're almost exclusively related to my soundcard driver, which is a shit piece of code and totally unrelated to microsoft. I dunno tho, this thing seems kinda stupid. And I'm part of their target demographic...
"Is it possible that something good is coming out of Redmond?"
Is it possible that a Slashdot editor could take submissions with at least some degree of subjectivity? Whether threedegrees is good or not, this sort of opinion in the post itself surely taints the comments.
Free iPods - now in the UK!
Really for a minute i thought i was going to be reading about something that was actually interesting. But no, its just another hyped up nothing. Im sure you could modify jabber to do the same useless things as this. When they talked about "not developing technology first" they wernt kidding.. theres really not much technology involved in allowing someone to send an image by draging it onto an icon, using an existing protocol/library. The music feature is the only slightly interesting thing but it restricts what you can do so its useless to me. Usually me and my friends use the technologically inferior method of typing the name of the song and getting the other person to download it. Or, ampache.org created a simple (100KB) way of sharing playlists, and its platform independent.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I know this is a pro-Linux, anti-Microsoft site (you can say what you like to disagree but the comments made by the owners are definately that way and the icons imply the same) but come on, if the requirements had been: Requires Linux 2.5.62 with KDE 3.0 and peer-to-peer upgrade. (with the subtitling that it doesn't run on windows) Would someone have made exactly the same comment?
I would if i had to pay for the 2.5.62 kernel or KDE 3.0
SP1 is an interesting one - maybe something in it is required - or maybe they're just using it to presuade people to run the fix. I don't know.
:-P
Or maybe they want to ensure that people are running non-pirated versions of XP.
My journal has hot
Regardless of who she works for, I applaud her drive and use of technology. Three Degrees seems like fun, er, cool, software. Her research into the project was intriguiging.
If this were through some startup, more people would think it was cool, but she'd be plagued with a lack of resource and substantiation. Now, she has the flipside of all that with Redmond behind her.
I hope it succeeds though my deepest desire would be for it to be platform independant.
People wonder why the state of commercial software is so sad -- I think that this article sums it up.
The fact that one of the largest, if not the largest, commercial software companies needs to be told that "the needs and attitudes of the customers should determine what software Microsoft should produce" denotes a total lack of clue on the whole issue of software production.
Software exists to automate or otherwise make better THE THINGS THAT PEOPLE DO. Thus, these things should be what drive the software. Hence the thrust toward usability, contextual design, the user stories of XP, etc.
Hey now. They do have some redeeming qualties. Yes, they are pop punk, but it doesn't mean they don't do it well.
Look at the Beatles. They don't particularly chime anything for me as a musician. Do I like them? Not at all. But hey, they captured hearts, even in todays day and age. Madonna... great girl, all natrual and that, pop artist. Doesn't do a bad job either. Just not good to me in what I'd like to hear.
It's all a matter of personal taste and culture. "I don't like blink182, and a thousand other people I like don't like them. Yeah! They suck!" Remember when Metallica was the shizit? Because of a lot of.. bad stuff from them lately, who would want to like them?
Someone said it best. If someone likes it, it must be music. Probably because it reflects as something to someone somewhere. As for Britney Spears.. I don't know how that works. But that's just me
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Me thinks that you do not understand opensource, or Linux in general.
First, we WOULD bitch if a user-space app required a development kernel. User space applications should not care WHAT kernel is running. I can run the LATEST version of apache on a Very old kernel - like the 2.0 series or even older.
Second, virtually ANY open source app can be "backported" to older systems / libraries. What happens with binaries that are dynamically compiled is that they can be tied to the version of libraries that they were linked with. This can be somewhat mitigated by static linking which is what apps like Netscape 4.X and Acrobat do - this allows them top run on ANY version / distro of linux.
Exceptions to recompile-and-run include Kernel Space stuff such as NetFilter which is pretty well integrated into the 2.4+ version of the kernel. Even this is not a hard-and-fast rule as subsystems like USB 2.0 support have been backported from the latest 2.5 dev kernel to 2.4 production.
So yeah, the WinXP SP1 requirement shows that MS does NOT "get it". It's the continual forced upgrades for no good reason that really pisses us off. Win2K is STILL a CURRENT platform, as it should be. MS needs to support is as a current platform. If they build a new app that needs new functionality, they should backport that functionality to W2K and any other current platform in new service pack. Hell, it's not like they can't afford to do this - the OS is their big money maker.
The reason you buy commercial software is for support. By not backporting, MS is effectivly End Of Life-ing Win2K WELL before their official stated EOL date. Why are you giving them money again?
Most IM systems are OS agnostic. Do you think MS will publish their protocol?
Umm... I'm no M$ fan, isn't it that M$N Messeneger protocol is open? That's you can see a lot of M$N clients for *nix systems, like gaim. They released the protocol years ago because of the IM wars with AOL (because AOL won't let M$N clients connect to AIM).
And besides, isn't it that there's a group, with M$ as one of it's members, who submitted a draft (I think it's now an RFC) for a new, and open IM standard.
Take-off every
You're old -
Treat a message as an object, and define properties of that object make it an instant message vs. an email:
Immediate - no delays in delivery
Brief - very short messages
Contextual - a single message is usually only part of a conversation
vs.:
Store and Forward - not necessarily immediate delivery
Email is as long as it needs to be
An email can be completely self contained
It's the difference between say, a logfile that gets dumped and emailed for review every morning, vs. a software generated alarm like an SNMP trap.
You could use jabber as an SNMP trap monitor, sending alarms to the appropriate personnels' desktops.
Of course, the immediacy is only as immediate as you make it. While you can only take one phone call at a time, you can easily multiplex between several IM cionversations and a phone conversation. Ironically, I have trouble multiplexing between composing an email and switching to an IM conversation.
A group can have no more than ten members
Songs will be played from the participants' hard drive, rather than illegally swapped.
So, you're going to be streaming MP3s to ten people at once? The bandwidth requirements for that are going to narrow their market considerably. That would kill my 768k/128k ADSL, it would almost certainly kill a cable modems' outgoing bandwidth, and you could forget about dialup entirely.
So do they expect these "trendy teens" to also be fantastically rich and have their own personal T3 lines?
Ubi dubium, ibi libertas.
Only a myopic, narrow-minded fool would ask such a question. Microsoft has developed and released some excellent products that continue to kick the fanny of most "free" applications. If all Microsoft software is crap, why do "free" software people keep trying to clone Word and Excel?
Upon occasion, I've been known to rag on Microsoft for their business practices, security holes, and over-featured monstrosities. They ruined Visual Studio with .Net (it's now REALLY slow and clunky), and Microsoft is often paranoid and downright nasty in their tactics. Word, for all of its good features, is a bloated corpse of technological excess. So hey, I'm no Microsoft shill, and more of my systems run Linux than run Windows.
Yet for all their faults, Microsoft has accomplished a lot in the last two decades, producing some useful and powerful software. Denying that is simple bigotry, seasoned with jealousy.
All about me
At least here in Finland you can find pretty much all net addicts with broadband in IRC 24/7 and DCC send is already a viable way of sending files fast to someone, or when you want to broadcast you drop the file on HTTP server and send the URL to your channel of choice so people can fetch it if they want. Most people with broadband do have some extra space on an HTTP server, and real net addicts have a shell account or static IP for IRCing anyway.
Actually this sounds more like trying to bind people to single platform, enforce DRM by allowing certain works to be broadcast to the party of 10 without allowing them to really save it.
There's really no advantage. If you are not into IRC, you can do the same with almost any Instant Messenger, be it MS or not. Even regular mailboxes tend to be large enough for a few mp3s.
I don't mean to flame MS for this, but really, I don't see any use, as existing cross-platform products are good for what it attempts to do without silly limitations.
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
The fact that is is similar to IRC should tell you (and any person who writes apps for Linux) something.
The user interface and user experience is key. Yes, this technology is like IRC. But, it probably doesn't have all of the cruft and baggage of IRC. No obscure server names to remember, no Ops, kicks, bots, channel storms, etc... Easier setup and connect, etc... The list of IRC woes is long. IRC was (is) a medium made by geeks for geeks. It's not an easy thing to understand and it's learning curve is practically vertical. The problems are a shame too, as the underlying concept of communication channels/rooms is valid and useful.
Dynamix did a lot to clean up IRC and make it easy to understand in their Tribes2 pre-game UI. 3deg of Separation sounds like an excellent attempt by Microsoft to make IRC style communications go mainstream.
Anyone who's ever written an IRC client should sit back and ask themselves, "Why wasn't I concerned with making IRC better instead of just making yet another IRC client?"