How To Skip The “I Accept The Terms And Conditions” WiFi Access Screen

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cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Bartek Kuzia

Every single time you go to Starbucks, you have to check the box that says that you accept the terms and conditions to use the free Internet connection before you will be connected. It’s not just coffee shops. Whenever you go to any hotspot that provides free WiFi, e.g., hotels, libraries, airports, etc., you usually have to deal with the same inconvenience.

The idea here is that the terms and conditions used at these locations is remarkably similar, so perhaps it makes sense to draft a boilerplate version of WiFi access Terms and Conditions—similar to the GNU and CC licenses used for software and creative works respectively. This way, you could tell your device that you will always accept these standard terms, and any location that used them unaltered would automatically allow you to skip the “I accept” screen and be immediately connected.

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Client: Starbucks, Holiday Inn, Barnes & Noble, The University of Texas.

PS: If a company wanted to use a few additional terms, they could do so with bullet points on the agreement page, which would present the added terms directly to the user before they agreed, making the agreement more transparent and ostensibly more enforceable. But knowing that they would force the user to make an additional step might make the company think twice about the necessity of additional terms.

The Browser As App Interface


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Jason A. Samfield

When you visit a website, the browser should customize itself to the site you are visiting—becoming an extension of the site itself.

For example, while on Tumblr, you might see three additional icons to the right of the Chrome address bar: one for creating a new post, one for inbox messages, and one for account settings or to logout. Now, these icons already exist within the page, but the idea here is to allow a site to skin the browser to free up space within the browser window itself.

A set of icon links beside the address bar seems to be the easiest iteration to begin with, but these could evolve into actions. For example, these could be a set of filters that process a photo in the main window, or buttons related to commercial transactions on the page.

Perhaps the user can toggle between browser mode and the app interface mode.

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Two Essential Features For Question & Answer Services


cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ViaMoi

I’ve spent some time on Quora, Yahoo Answers, and similar sites, but the one thing that continues to frustrate me while I use them is that there are so many similar questions with similar answers, and there are so many answers delivered as attempts at humor or cleverness which do not really address the intent of the person asking the question, and therefore are clutter on the page.

These sites, however, seem sold on the idea of retaining everything within a question in some form. If you are trying to provide a service where people can get great answers to good questions, you need to be able to remove material that is not providing that value. I’m not talking about deleting controversial answers; those should remain available. But let the material of no substance go away. If you just gray it out and tell me it was downvoted, I don’t know whether it was controversial or just junk, so I still have to invest in clicking it and reading it. This is undesirable.

Secondly, and most importantly, there must be a way for two similar questions asked to be merged. Consider the following questions:

  1. How do I learn to play the guitar?
  2. What specific things should beginners focus on when learning guitar?
  3. What’s the first thing you should master when learning to play the guitar?

These are three actual individual questions on Quora right now. Quora and other QA sites become more difficult to navigate if these similar questions are not merged into one question. There is also the value added of increasing the likelihood of finding the one really great answer if you merge the questions.

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Personal Information Security With Payments By Proxy

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I think people are still a bit uncomfortable about having a permanent record of every transaction on file at their bank or credit union, at Visa or Mastercard, and at the websites where they purchased these goods.

Some websites abbreviate their name or use a DBA or parent company to leave a more innocuous record, but this provides only a superficial layer of protection. It is more likely that most people involved in the transaction have long ago learned what certain abbreviations and DBA’s stand for.

A payment service could be offered that acts as a proxy between a person and a transaction of digital goods or services. This payment facilitator would, for a small fee, purchase the digital goods and services itself, and upon reciept of them, encrypt the information and deliver the contents to the end user.

I beleive the integrity of the service relies on it being used for a number of different digital items. Of course, we can think of one $5 billion online industry that would benefit from this, but there are many others as well. For example, it could be used to purchase digital books that someone wanted to keep from influencing their reading recommendations, or used to pay for the hosting of a site promoting democracy in an oppressed nation. You could use it to watch a controversial documentary that you wanted to inform yourself about but knew you would likely disagree with, or buy MP3’s from a site you didn’t want to create an account with. The possibilities are myriad.

The web service offering this would charge the consumer for the service, and not the product purchased by proxy, so all transactional records would indicate the service provider’s name only on any financial statement, that is, the available information would be limited to when you  used the service and what you were charged. Because of security and encryption protocols on the service provider’s website, the other details of the transaction would be largely unavailable or protected. 

The current model seems to involve setting up virtual currencies, converting things into some proprietary unit, and getting sites to support these units. The advantage of the method I’m outlining here is that there’s no uphill battle to shift the paradigm of the existing dominant online payment methods, e.g., debit and credit. It works within the standard model.

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Image: The Great Seal
a CC Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from grebo_guru’s photostream

URL Shortening With Readable Words


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Steve took it

Remember when tinyurl.com thought that it was itself a tiny URL—before sites like t.co showed them just how tiny a URL really can be?

Anyhow, all of these bit.ly styled URL shortening services seem to use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters and numerals to create a string of characters that follow the main address of the website.

Given that sources from the Internet are increasingly being referenced in print (e.g., research papers, magazines, newspapers, and even books,) I think it would be great to offer a URL shortening service that used small words as its unique identifiers instead of letters and numbers.

For example, instead of sample.me/xU68uwWe, you would have sample.me/cellar-door or sample.me/box.potato, &c. Basically, the URL generating program would make combinations of small words having less than six or so letters and separating them by a hyphen or period.

There have to be millions of combinations that are possible with the words that would qualify, especially if you added the plural form of nouns and the participle forms of verbs, &c. It would make referencing the material much easier, even if the URL wasn’t as short as a typical shortening service, it would still be much better than the alternative, e.g., http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45583480/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/

But this idea has a limited shelf life. After all, one day soon, newspapers, magazines, books, and research papers will be digital by default and read on devices that are always connected to the Cloud, which is the shiny new word for the Internet.

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PS: Can we be done with http:// at the beginning of what is clearly or even likley a website address? Just like we all know www is the default, so too do we know http:// comes before it all, unless otherwise specified. Thank you for your cooporation.

The Paradox Of An Intellectual Quandary


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Ennuipoet * FreeVerse Photography

In 2005, I briefly worked on the conceptual development and research of a payment processing start-up company. I made a 15 minute multimedia presentation that I sent to Google, among others. I never heard back. A year later, Google Checkout (and later Facebook’s payment system) launched with many of the same ideas in it. I hesitate to say that the ideas were only my ideas though. I’ll explain why.

Last year, in the middle of April, I wrote about combining the group buying phenomenon with the GPS functionality of a smartphone to offer people daily deals that were right around the corner. This idea wasn’t disseminated this time. Nevertheless, a few weeks later, Groupon launched Groupon Now, which is essentially this idea. It demonstrates how ideas are often in more than one place at the same time.

Ten years ago, I started wearing my belt fastened at the side, because I had accidentally threaded it incorrectly one day. A while after I had already stopped doing this, I saw other people doing the same thing. I was certainly not an influential pioneer of fashion in 2002 (although I totally called the trend of intentional stains on jeans long before it came about), but I had simply done something that others had also thought to do, and done it around the same time. You’ve probably had something like this happen to you too.

The selfish part of us would love to claim these ideas as our own even though we know that it’s not very likely that we had much to do with it. Similarly, there are many other examples of ideas that I’ve had that have come into being without any significant or major effort on my part to make them happen. The first few examples that come to mind:

This happens to me often, but I’m fairly certain it happens to others too. Because of this, it is difficult to seek credit for an idea alone, because you can never be absolutely sure that it isn’t in the mind of thousands of others around the same time. Sometimes, you’ll even have an idea for a new product only to find out that the product seems to have been around for a while (like reusable cable ties.)

I believe credit goes to the one who successfully publishes, iterates, or executes the idea. At the same time, credit for the success and popularization of an idea belongs to everyone who nurtures the concept. So, for the concepts above (perhaps with an exception for the payment systems), I cannot demand any acknowledgement for simply having the idea, but I can acknowledge myself for whatever nurturing of the idea I did.


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Ennuipoet * FreeVerse Photography

Not to get metaphysical, but I believe that when an idea enters a mind, it has entered the Universe. I don’t know how it works, exactly, but it seems that the more thought that is given to the idea, the more “present” or “in focus” it becomes. And, as it comes more into focus, it’s more likely that someone else—perhaps thousands of miles away—will find themselves on the same wavelength, and the idea will pop into their head too. Neither person knows the actual history of the idea; they simply know when it became an idea of theirs.

The intellectual quandary concerns the paradoxical notion that most ideas, and specifically practical and good ideas, cannot have one precise and absolute genesis. The primary question, therefore, cannot be about who came up with what first, but rather, who did something with it? Who shared it? Who worked on it? Who improved it?

This website is a place for me to share ideas that have found their way into my mind. They are probably elsewhere too. Maybe one or two aren’t. By sharing them, I can do my part to nurture them better than they would be if I simply wrote them down in a notebook and put them on the shelf.

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Highlighting In GMail


cc licensed flickr photo shared by Sandyhombre

I’ve recently made the switch to GMail, after spending many years at Yahoo!, who recently dropped the ball with their latest redesign. I had gone with Yahoo! in the earlier days because the aesthetic design of GMail left a lot to be desired. Thankfully, GMail (and Google more generally) has come a long way since I first used it.

That said, I think there should be the capability in GMail to highlight parts of a message and either have this highlighting stay a part of the message in your archive, and/or allow the highlighting to be sent along with the message if you were forwarding it or replying to it.

Gmail-highlighting

This way, I could highlight the part of the message that was important to me, and when I needed to reference the email again, I wouldn’t have to waste time relocating the part or parts of the message that I’m probably looking for. 

It’s easy to imagine how this could help the conversation if you were replying to an email and wanted to reference a specific part of the original email without cutting and pasting. Or, if you were forwarding the message, you do the recipient the courtesy of directing their attention to the part you wanted them to look at.

I’m thinking the highlighting could be toggled on or off, and maybe you offer 3-5 different colors of highlighting later on. I’d be happy with the standard yellow for now. 

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UPDATE: While GMail does not allow highlighting of messages before archiving or attaching as a forward, it does allow highlighting of inline forwarded messages when composed in HTML.