Zuckerberg actually is the Person of the Year. You made it so.

Last week Time Magazine named Mark Zuckerberg its "Person of the Year". Guessing the "Person of the Year" is perhaps the one remaining upper-middle-class parlour game, where you can stroke your chin, cluck your tongue and wonder if they are going to go for the painfully obvious (2008 - Obama, 1989/2000 - Bush) or throw a curveball (1988 - Planet Earth,  1983 - The Computer).

As is to be expected, the choice of Zuckerberg put many people up in arms, but the most interesting were the cries from tech journalists. There was the predictable mocking of Time, implying that they only just now discovered Facebook after the rest of the world did. Many of them said that this showed the death of print journalism, how it didn't reflect what was really going on in the online world, how it could never capture that zeitgeist anymore. Others also said that it seemed odd to reward Zuckerberg with the honour considering that he wasn't really changing the world.

What's interesting here is that who is really out of step are those very same writers, who have forgotten the most important thing of all: Know what you're talking about.

First of all, the person of the year is not an "honour" in the traditional sense. Its purpose, as defined by Time, is the acknowledge the person who "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year.". Hence there is the frequently cited Ayatollah Khomeini (1979) and Adolph Hitler (1938), people who would not have been hailed as heroes at that time. It's why you also have the aforementioned Computer and Planet Earth. If you want to honour the person who changed the world for a given time period, please check the Nobel prizes. Time is not the place, and does not set itself out to be that place, so please don't try to be angry about something that it is not.

A lot of people felt that Julian Assange should have been "Person of the Year", but considering most of his impact was (1) late in the year and (2) we've yet to see how it fully develops, let's hold off a bit. (I plan to be writing more on this later)

Secondly, if you're going to claim that Zuckerberg did not have a high impact on news for the year, please check a lot of what you, as tech writers, wrote this year. Topics included

• Ongoing privacy concerns about Facebook, leading to how we live online and shifting notions of what privacy was for this online generation;
• Many articles about politicians going outside the traditional press cycle and communicating to people via Facebook (such as Sarah Palin);
• Facebook launching Social Graph, stretching beyond its walled garden and placing its content and functionality on other sites
• The Social Network being a critical and commercial hit.
• Zuckerberg's funding of the pubic school system in Newark
• Zuckerberg's signing The Giving Pledge, stating he will donate most of his earnings over his lifetime to charity.

This is without even going into the continued expansion of social networking/media, how it's tied into everything from "slacktivism" to Old Spice marketing campaigns. I'm not even touching on Facebook Places being launched, and any number of "Facebook vs Google vs Twitter" pieces that filled tech blogs. Even if a lot of the activity was on networks like Twitter, the fact that Zuckerberg's creation is still the gold standard for not only social media but web traffic makes him the de facto poster boy for the technology.

So, let me see if I got this straight:

1. Print journalism is ridiculously out of step with what is really going on, and tech journalists really know the pulse of the online world.
2. Most tech writers spent the whole year writing about Zuckerberg as a personality, social media as a medium of cultural change, and Facebook as one of the biggest businesses in the world.
3. Time says that Zuckerberg has had the most impact on the news for 2010.

From where I sit, it seems like Time in determining who had the most impact of the news actually listened to you and understood what you were saying, and that you're the ones who didn't take the time to understand what Time was saying, and blaming it for your own oversight/laziness in actually finding out what the actual story was.

Because, after all, you wrote it.

The joys of being disconnected

We've recently spent a few days recovering at our cottage, which is a few hours north of Toronto. While this is "cottage country", we're not really in the "high density" land of cottages as big as your house. In fact, our cottage isn't even insulated, has no well, and you can feel noticeable drops in elevation as you move the five feet from the kitchen/dining room to the wood-burning stove. The directions to the cottage include the phrase "unassumed road" and "honk here so any other cars coming towards you can pull to the side". There's no phone, the one radio station that comes in clearly seems to record its news first thing in the morning and then run that on a loop every half hour, and the only signal the TV reliably gets is from the DVD player we hook up to it.

I love it. It's always been a joy to get up there and away from it all. However, for the past few years that isolation has been harder and harder to get. A few years ago, in fact, you couldn't even get a solid cell signal unless you were standing in a particular part of the front yard. But now there's good coverage, and I can check up on things on my iPhone. And if that's not enough, I can also tether said iPhone to my laptop and get a full(ish) internet experience. Our car has a satellite radio, and at one time I had a portable XM radio that I'd hook up to follow ball games.

I know it's a personal choice to use these things, but it's also a very easy action to take. This is doubly hard when you have a bit of curiosity. For example, I was reading a book about the most excellent album In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. They were part of the Elephant 6 collective, which swapped members and recorded in many different permutations under many different names. The album itself is based on emotions stirred up by lead singer Jeff Mangum's reading of The Diary of Anne Frank. This book, while pretty comprehensive, can't tell you everything, and is a pretty good read. It's also part of an excellent series of books that I've also discovered are available on my Kindle (which also gets a connection at the cottage).

Now, time would have been when I would have written all that information down in my Moleskine notebook and looked at it when I got home. But it's so easy to just bring up wikipanion on my phone, or fire up my Kindle and just satiate my curiosity right then and there. In fact, each link in the above paragraph was something I looked up in a 20 minute period on Sunday night.

In the process, some of the joy of being disconnected is gone.

Today, my last day at the cottage, I did a test. At a point I just told myself I wasn't going to check anymore. I wasn't going to check my email, I called a halt to twitter, sat down with my book and pen and paper and went off the grid. I'd like to say it felt good, and it did after a while. The first hour, though, was pure torture because I KNEW how easy and zero-cost it would be to just check in, get some news, but I went through the detox and the shakes and broke through. But it wasn't enjoyable, and I lost some of that feeling of disconnection that was the bliss there.

Next time, I'll make it easier on myself. As soon as I get there I'll plug in my phone, turn off the wireless services and and keep it nearby just as a phone, and I'll rely on paper and binding books. Hopefully this will make my cottage experience more of what I love: Something far from the unassumed road.

Kinda like the music Neutral Milk Hotel made.

Saying goodbye to Tweetie

The choice of a Twitter client might seem like a trivial decision. In many ways it is since you can consume it via the website, and if you're running a smartphone you can get a mobile version of the site that works perfectly well. However, a lot of people run multiple accounts or want a little extra "omph" in their Twitter experience, and so there are many mobile and desktop apps available. A lot of people swear by TweetDeck, but I've found it to be a very greedy client in terms of screen space and how it runs on my machine.

For years I've used Tweetie, or Twitter for iPhone. When I first started using it I found it nice and clean, simple to use, and lightweight enough for my needs. A lot of other people felt the same way and it became one of the most popular clients even though it only ran on iPhones and Macs. It was so popular, in fact, that Twitter (as a corporate entity) bought it and rebranded it as Twitter for iPhone.

Today will probably be the last day that I will use it as my client on my desktop, laptop and iPhone. And this has nothing to do with it being a sell-out. A lot of this has to do with problems in the app that surfaced a long time ago, in many cases before the sale.

The app was continually cited as a high water point in design. And I agree with that, to a degree. The point where we diverge is that with each version of the product, a new set of decisions was made that flat out contradicted what the previous version had - The best example being moving settings from settings.app (something there was a great deal of passion regarding) into the app itself. Options would either change or completely disappear, for example the ability to define how you wanted your quoted tweets to appear.

I do realize, and agree, that a good analyst and developer should work to minimize the number of options available. (A smart person once told me that every time you use an option, you're admitting that you don't want to take the time to make a decision). At the same time you can't just remove options and say "I've decided this is best for you, and if you don't like it change it yourself" after having given them the choice.

Secondly, the technical performance of the application had degraded. For example, the curent version of Twitter for iPhone does not appear to recognize that you have read a DM, so each time you open the app you see a glow indicating you have unread direct messages which you have read a number of times before.

You can also see which of your tweets have been retweeted using Twitter's built in function, but unlike the web app you can't see who actually retweeted it and how many times. This feature appeared for about three days, but was inconsistent at best, often creating multiple instances of the same tweet.

The desktop app has become vestigial. Promised updates never appear, and most of the time thumbnail avatars never display, meaning that you can have an entire timeline of mostly blank icons. I've noticed that this tends to happen any time someone changes their avatar (I also recognize it might have something to do with people who use twibbons).

All these combined mean that I'm not getting a great experience. When I use an app and I'm more distracted by its annoyances and inconsistencies than I am by features it has, or if I find I have to go to more than one source to get a complete experience, then it's time to move on.

I'm pondering using EventBox for my desktop client, or maybe moving back to DestroyTwitter. I'll also be trying out a number of iPhone clients, possibly even writing about my experiences here.

How about you? What are your favorite clients? What do you like/not like about any clients that you have used?