Boot up: Facebook's emotional paper, OnePlus many?, Google and trust

Ivory Coast's midfielder Geoffroy Serey Die is overcome with emotion as he listens to his national anthem before the start of the match. Just wait till he sees Facebook. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty

A burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Adam Kramer was one of the authors of the Facebook paper:

OK so. A lot of people have asked me about my and Jamie and Jeff's recent study published in PNAS, and I wanted to give a brief public explanation. The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends' negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. We didn't clearly state our motivations in the paper.

…Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.

Just in case you haven't read the paper that pretty much nobody noticed. Only three pages. Its conclusion: what other people write on the internet can affect your state of mind if you read it.

Steve Kovach:

OnePlus is only selling the phone through an invitation system. The only way to get an invitation is to sign up through the company's website.

The OnePlus One is one of the few smartphones available that ship with an operating system called Cyanogen. Cyanogen is an open source mobile OS that takes Android and adds a few minimalistic tweaks that improve the overall user experience. For years, most users were geeks who hacked Cyanogen onto their phones, but Cyanogen is making a push to come preinstalled on high-end hardware like the OnePlus One.

At first glance, it looks just like the standard version of Android that comes with Google's own line of Nexus smartphones, but there are a lot of nice extras like option to install customized fonts, themes, and sounds.

Sounds great. However, it's a small company, and some users are complaining on its forums about the difficulty of getting their order fulfilled.

Dan Rockmore:

I banned laptops in the classroom after it became common practice to carry them to school. When I created my "electronic etiquette policy" (as I call it in my syllabus), I was acting on a gut feeling based on personal experience. I'd always figured that, for the kinds of computer-science and math classes that I generally teach, which can have a significant theoretical component, any advantage that might be gained by having a machine at the ready, or available for the primary goal of taking notes, was negligible at best. We still haven't made it easy to type notation-laden sentences, so the potential benefits were low. Meanwhile, the temptation for distraction was high. I know that I have a hard time staying on task when the option to check out at any momentary lull is available; I assumed that this must be true for my students, as well.

Fred Wilson revisits his list of required attributes from 2011 for a web app:

Nowhere on this list is Trust. Maybe that was an oversight. Or maybe times have changed.

Take auto photo backup from my Android phone to the cloud. I have two great options on my phone, Dropbox and Google+.

I don't use Google+ for this and I do use Dropbox for this.

It is not that I don't trust Google to host my photos. And it is not that I don't trust Google in general. It is that I don't trust Google to change the privacy rules on Google+ and instantly expose all of these photos to their crawlers and the web at large.

It's really Facebook's fault that I don't trust Google with this.

Apple offered a statement directly to Ars Technica: "With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X." In addition to telling users that iPhoto will be discontinued and rolled into the new Photos app, Apple also confirmed to Ars Technica that Aperture will be updated to ensure Yosemite compatibility, but users shouldn't expect any further development or updates beyond that.

iPhoto first introduced 2002, Aperture in 2005.

Min Ming Lo:

What do each of these symbols [above] have in common? They are all trying to convey the exact same action - share! Sharing to a social network or via email is a ubiquitous action nowadays but designers have still not been able to reach a consensus on what symbol to use to represent it. Not only does each major platform use a different icon, but they've each witnessed changes over the years.

I have spent sometime thinking about this, trying to figure out which symbol best conveys sharing to the user.

I agree with the conclusion.

Adi Robertson:

For its latest project — an adaptation of Rameau's Pygmalion performed amidst wax statues and mannequins — [New York's On Site Opera] tested a new kind of [opera lyric] translation, projected not on a wall but on the lens of Google Glass. Working with veteran supertitling company Figaro Systems, On Site Opera streamed its lyrics through a web app called MobiText, allowing them to be played on Glass or a cellphone. It's not just an experiment, it's a way for On Site Opera to expand beyond an English-only repertoire. "There are some companies that do translations in English, singing translations, and that's not something that we want to do. We like the idea of doing it in the original language," says Einhorn. But the venues it picks — including Harlem's legendary Cotton Club and the Bronx Zoo — can't effectively support projectors. "It became a real question for us — how do we do that? How do we get titles to people effectively?"

At a showing last week, the system worked surprisingly well. Readable but minimally distracting translations floated in the corner of my vision, allowing me to move my eyes instead of my head.

The overlap of opera-goers and Glass wearers must surely run into the dozens. Also: "My biggest problem was power: the roughly 45-minute, one-act opera drained half my battery."

Sinead Kennedy points out that wearables have to communicate with us in new ways:

While at SXSW this year, I went to a workshop on sensory UX with @Acuity_Design. We were given the task of communicating a sentence to one another with only touch (by the way, our skin can detect three sensations: pain, pressure, and temperature).

A team of three people directed my hands to different recognizable shapes and materials. As I spoke out loud as to what I believed they were trying to tell me, there was little they could do to respond to my thought process.

At one point, they took my hand to form a "thumbs up," and while it was obvious to everyone watching that they were telling me I had just said one of the correct words, to me it just felt like I should now be saying the word "like."

Taking ourselves outside of the visual-rules-all world and into one in which we were challenged to communicate in news ways made it apparent that what we think is obvious is not in fact obvious when we are lacking our visual faculties. And this was all with a small group of people, never mind designing for mass users.

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