Queer Musings

Facebook Changes Mind

The small independent lesbian film And Then Came Lola has achieved a small victory today. According to their blog, Facebook has now approved their ad.

Thanks for contacting us about this. Your ad has now been re-reviewed and approved. We apologize for any inconvenience.

That's a rather generic sounding response to the issue, but I'm glad to see that Facebook was willing to change their mind.

Thanks to everyone that picked up my original post and help spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, and mulitple other sites. I would like to especially thank Bil at The Bilerico Project for featuring my post.

Will Facebook be the Next Target of Twitter Users?

Earlier this month Amazon faced some harsh criticism from Twitter users upset over the apparent banning of sales rankings on LGBT books. They had to come up with a response the Monday after Easter due to the overwhelming outcry from Twitter users.

Will Facebook become the next target of Twitter users outrage? It could happen with the rejection of an ad for the lesbian film And Then Came Lola.

The movie was hoping to target the ad to women who listed themselves as interested in women and over the age of 18. So where's the problem? From my way of thinking, that is the demographic that would want to see And Then Came Lola.

Honestly I see nothing wrong with the picture they wanted to use for the ad. It's not any different than ones I see on Facebook daily advertising gay cruises. At least all three of the women are fully dressed. There doesn't seem to be anything inappropriate happening between the three of them.

Is this a form of homophobia on Facebook's part?

According to the Facebook FAQ for Advertising Guidelines:

"Facebook is committed to protecting our user experience by keeping the site clean, uncluttered, and free from intrusive advertising. We believe that we can help transform existing advertising on Facebook into tailored messages to our users, because they are based on how their friends interact and affiliate with the brands, music artists, and businesses they care about."

Well the ads I see every day look like the one pictured. Everyday I'm treated to the sight of two shirtless gay men advertising what has always been in my mind nothing more than a floating bathhouse.

The reason Facebook gives for rejecting the advert is as follows:

"The image of this ad is either irrelevant or inappropriate. Per sections 3 and 8 of Facebook's Advertising Guidelines, the image on your ad should be relevant and appropriate to the item being advertised. Make sure your image is directly relevant to what you are advertising. Images that are overly explicit, provocative, or that reveal too much skin are not allowed. Images that may either degrade or idealize any health condition or body type are also not allowed. If you choose to submit this ad again, please use an appropriate image that adheres to all of Facebook's Advertising Guidelines."

I get the overly explicit part. I don't go to Facebook to see advertisements for adult oriented sites. I already know how to find most of those, and those I don't know about I can always Google.

What I don't get is the rest of the response. There's much less skin showing in the movie's picture than the one for the cruise. I don't find it any more provocative than the ad showing a gay couple enjoying themselves on the deck of the cruise ship.

When it comes to the part of an idealized body type, they may have a point. All three women look to be the typical model/actress type of build. It's not any different with the cruise ad. Neither of those men look like me. They have a pretty idealized body type.

Everything they said in their rejection is something I see everyday. I'm hoping that Facebook made an honest mistake, but I don't think they did.

I just don't get the reasoning behind the rejection. Maybe someone can explain it to me.

Pixelpipe for Android

I've decided to give the Pixelpipe for Android application a try. There's a few things that don't work the way I think they should, but overall I'm happy with it.

Pixelpipe's goal is to make distribution of you media to multiple sites easier. So far I've added Flickr, Twitpic, Facebook, and this blog to my "pipes". I'm actually trying out the blog posting tool for this post.

The big complaint that I have is it is not inuitive. The media tab presents all the photos (and probably video on future Android devices) that are on your SD card. To the right of the picture is an icon with a blue arrow. I first thought that you would touch the screen on the picture to add a title, caption, and any tags. it turns out that puts it in your upload queue, and the default is to upload immediately. The blue arrow that I thought would queue the photos happens to activate the dialogue window to add the title and other info. This is something that can easily be corrected with a future update.

Another thing that needs a quick update, is the autocorrection when typing. My G1 doesn't have a full spell check like the iPhone (so please excuse any mistakes today), but it does auto correct i to I or cant to can't. just little things that make typing on the G1's keyboard easier. it does not (as you can see on this sentence) autocorrect the capitalization after a period. I've grown accustommed to that when typing an email or sending a tweet in Twidroid. This is just a minor thing that will probably get fixed in an update.

Finally, I do have an issue with how it formats a blog post with a photo. If you look at the previos post on here you'll see what I'm talking about. When it posts the picture it centers it, which is fine. It also, however, wraps the caption in the center tags resulting in the text looking a bit odd. I'm going to check Pixelpipe's web site to see if there are any options for formatting blog posts. My fingers are crossed that the text of this post doesn't end up looking funky.

I think this app will be great when I'm out and about and want to send a picture to multiple places with ease. I don't think I'll be using it for long blog posts, but I can see myself using it for those times when the 140 character limit impossed by Twitter is too limiting. The app is off to a great start, with a few minor updates it could become a spectacular app.

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Google Voice Search Needs Some Work

I just received the latest over the air update to my G1. Part of the update was the addition of voice search on Google. I thought I would give it a test drive and see how it performed.

I tried to do a search for the following phrase, "how does voice search work on google." The following results were surprising.

• teen boys sex work on google
• stowe boyd search work on google
• medieval games boys
• patterns for sexual
• dans movies search work on google
• girls does voice search work on google

It took six tries before it got it right. Some of the wrong ones were so off target, I don't understand how it could have made that type of mistake. I can buy "stowe" for "how," but other than that when it's wrong, it's way wrong. EPIC FAIL!!!

Part of the Google search is to help you find restaurants in your area. So I decided I would just try one simple word. Sushi. That one simple word worked beautifully. I received a list of restaurants in the area, with phone numbers I could click. Since it was using the phone's GPS I could also click to get directions to the any of the restaurants.

Since it seemed to be working, I thought I would try something that may be a little harder. I decided to search for "Thai food." As with sushi it worked beautifully. I would not have been surprised if the voice recognition algorithm had thought that I had said "die food."

Since I was on a food kick, I thought I would try for a good old Texan favorite. so I fired up the voice search and said, "barbecue." It gave me the response, "bar b que."

Okay, I can live with that, it at least had everything phonetically correct. And the search results were not to restaurants, but to pages like Wikipedia's entry on barbecue. Not what I was wanting, but it was at least on the right track.

I then thought, what if I get more specific on that last search. What if I say "barbecue restaurant?" Like my previous search for "sushi" and "Thai food" it did fine.

Then I figured I would just try a couple of random things.

1. when is the next episode of top chef
2. information on gay marriage

I didn't notice what the results were for those terms, but I did look in the search box to see what it said. It had each one letter perfect for my terms.

Since it seemed to be working I thought I would try my first phrase again. It was a little bit better as you can see.

• windows live search work on google
• toledo police search work on google

This time it only took me two tries before it recognized I was saying, "how does voice search work in Google." It moved from an epic fail to just -- FAIL!

I figured I would try the same search term again to see if I could do it with only one wrong result. Odd results to say the least.

• turtle dove symbolize search work on google
• houston police search work for google
• alto voice search on google

I gave up. I didn't want it to take another seven or eight tries before getting the search term correct.

It was enough to make me think that maybe it has a problem when I say "how." So I decided to try a couple of random phrases that started with that word. I tried, "how do i find information on gay marriage in texas," and "how many days are in a leap year." They both worked correctly.

Maybe it has a problem with how I say, "how does."

I then figured it was time to try a search that would be practical to use. I started the app and said, "showtimes 76040." It worked just as well as if I had typed the search term into Google.

Searches that you would probably do when out and about seemed to be working. It got me to thinking about how I could trip it up. I had just watched "Lost" and "Top Chef" so I thought I would search for some names off of those show. I tried three different names.

1. Danielle Rousseau
2. Daniel Faraday
3. Tom Collicchio

All three went off without a hitch.

I was getting a little bored with my experiment so I decided to try one last search. I simply said, "define Padawan." It gave me a result that was close to the mark. It fired back with "define capital 1." Okay, I can see that, but I thought I would try it again. On the second try it worked great.

Overall voice search on the G1 and Google works well. I think part of the problem is voice recognition is not 100% effective yet. It's getting closer, but Google still needs to put some more work into the voice search.

Social Aggregation Frustrations

Like most people on the web I post to multiple sites. Some of the different places, other than this blog, that I post to include Twitter, FaceBook, and FriendFeed. For a more complete list you can check out the "My Other Accounts" on the side bar.

The problem with having a presence on more than one site is updating each of them with posts. Sometimes you want something to be shared across all of the different sites, and there's just not an easy way to do it that properly reflects what you wanted posted.

What got me to thinking about this today is my Twitter friend leewaters.

Twitter feeds my FriendFeed. FriendFeed feeds my Facebook. And yet, I still find myself posting found items to FB, bypassing the others.

I find myself doing the same thing. After talking with him about it, we find that FaceBook is where we get the most feedback to our posted items.

The problem as I see it is the posts end up looking different on FaceBook and FriendFeed. When posting to either place you have an option for a picture to post along with your comment about about what your posting. When the one site cross posts to the other you only end up with a link to the item. No picture or comment that you've made crosses over between the two sites.

After digging through the settings on the two sites to see if there was any way to improve the quality of cross posts, I gave up. Instead I decided to take a look at Ping.fm to see if there was a way to post between the two sites. Unfortunately your limited to just text and links for most posts. If you want to post any pictures with your post, you have to do it through e-mail. Not a very effective way to share items quickly on the web.

I'm not discussing any problems with cross posting to Twitter because its limitations are to be expected. Twitter only allows someone to post text and links. So when FriendFeed or FaceBook posts to Twitter you know what to expect.

So what are we supposed to do? Do we just pick one site to post to and accept the limitations that cross posting to the other one is going to be truncated and the full context my be lost? Or, do we set up FaceBook and FriendFeed to no longer cross post, then just post to each one individually?

For now I think I'm going to opt for posting just to FaceBook and accept that in FriendFeed it's going to be reduced to just a link. In the mean time I'm going to keep waiting and checking for the one perfect social aggregator to come along. It's not an ellegant solution, but it's the one that works best for me at the moment.

If anyone has a better solution, please feel free to leave me a comment.

T-Mobile's G1: First Impressions

Today is the official launch of the T-Mobile G1. I pre-ordered mine, so I was one of the lucky ones to get their hands on the G1 a couple of days early. I thought I would share some of my first impressions of the G1 and its new operating system Android.

First off, let me say the battery life yesterday was teh suck! I have a feeling that it was simply due to me using it almost nonstop while at work. We were pretty slow yesterday, so anytime I wasn't on a call I had the G1 in hand testing T-Mobiles 3G network for all it was worth (guess it's a good thing T-Mobile backed down in the 1 GB soft cap). I got about a good three and a half hours of nonstop data usage with GPS turned on before I had to plug in the G1. I have a feeling once the newness wears off, and I do simple things like turning off the GPS along with the Wi-Fi when I don't need it, the battery life should be noticeably better.

Anyway, moving on...

Got My T-Mobile G1

Not much to say about it at the moment. Just playing around with it and testing the mobile Typepad site out.

I'll post more later about my first thoughts.

Cnet Review: T-Mobile G1

Cnet has released their first look at the T-Mobile G1. I called T-Mobile earlier to confirm my order. The automated system said it was on back order. I then talked to a rep that said I should be getting mine on or around October 22. I really hope it's not on back order because I ordered it the first day it was available for order.

Will the G1 Turn the Heat up on the iPhone?

As I check the tubes for news and rumors of the T-Mobile G1, I'm getting a more excited about my decision to order one. Of course it could just be a byproduct of my desire to get off of EDGE and onto a phone that is 3G capable.

Will the G1 be an iPhone killer? I don't think so, but it does have a few things going for it that might make some people think twice about which phone to purchase. Check out the cartoon to the left for a humorous look at some of the differences.

If Android has even moderate success, it may force Apple to lighten up on their app approval process. I don't see Apple going to a totally open app store like the one Google and Android are promising, but you never know.

The main thing I'm looking forward to is getting away from Windows Mobile. With news of Windows Mobile 7 being delayed, I don't think it's worth waiting to see how an upgrade will benefit the consumer.

I'm also looking forward to improved speed on the G1. I did a side by side comparison at Cnet, and it looks like the G1 will kick my Wing's ass all over the place. The two main features that are an improvement over the Wing (which is made by HTC just like the G1), is screen resolution and processor speed.

I'll try to keep the G1 posts to a minimum. I know I'm probably the only one moderately excited about it. I was just bored and after checking a few things out on the web, I thought I would just jot down my thoughts on them.

Submission to the Android Overlords

I couldn't help myself. I felt the overwhelming urge to submit to the Android overlords and pre-order the T-Mobile G1.

I currently own the T-Mobile Wing, which is still an okay phone. I've had it since it came out in May of last year, so I really didn't need a new phone. I just couldn't resist the urge for a shiny new toy. Well that, and I really wanted a 3G phone that didn't require me to switch to another carrier.

The one thing I was concerned about was Wi-Fi access at T-Mobile HotSpot. I have the T-Mobile Total Internet as part of my phones plan. With that I have unlimited access to T-Mobile Wi-Fi within the US, and the ability to roam at select partners outside of the US.

I called T-Mobile last night to see if that was part of the 3G data plan. According to the representative I talked to it does include hotspot access. I still couldn't find anything in the fine print that clearly said that access was included.

The reason I was concerned about hotspot access is due to the fact that while you get unlimited data, it may not be unlimited 3G.

Data: If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less.

That's from the fine print detailing the G1's 3G plan. I don't know how hard it will be to reach a 1GB limit, but I can't imagine it would be that hard if someone watches a lot of YouTube, or downloading applications from the app store. So Wi-Fi could be really important. Guess it's a good thing you can't download Amazon MP3s over 3G.

On the bright side, I should be fully covered in the 3G department.

I should have the phone around October 22. I'm looking forward to seeing what the phone has to offer. The way I look at it, the phone is only $179 with a two year extension on my contract. I'm not in any hurry to change carriers, and if the phone sucks I have 30 days to change my mind and get out of the contract extension.

Look for my firs impressions once I get the G1. I don't think this phone will be an iPhone killer, but the concept behind the phone and having an open platform could lead to one.