Yoz Grahame's Cheerleader: Three degrees of separation, and rising

February 25, 2003

Three degrees of separation, and rising

Looking into the far future, I see an image of myself, old and wrinkled on a rocking chair, surrounded by children. They look up at me and ask, "Grampa, tell us about your wild adventures as a heat-seeking beta bunny!" And I reply, "Oh, my sweethearts, those days are long gone. I used to be young and crazy, downloading every shiny 0.2 release, pumping the nightlies, having to vape my Windows install every three months. I eased off after a while - the RSI and blood pressure - but even so, I was still desperate for new toys, hungry to ride the bleeding edge of the Freshmeat wave. Then came the Threedegrees beta..." At that point the prophecy goes a bit blurry because I start shouting and hitting the children and shortly after that I'm Soylent Green.

It's the fault of the children, you see. In case you've missed all the fanfare, ThreeDegrees is Microsoft's new chat/P2P/music app that came about through the revolutionary process of asking the teenagers at which it's aimed to help design it. The app lets users organise themselves into social groups (point and clique?). Groups are limited to a ten-member maximum, a bizarrely arbitrary limit that will hopefully be the first victim of the beta programme. Group members can chat, share pictures, play music and "wink" at each other. ("Winking" is a kind of animated emoticon broadcast to all members of the group. Wondering why you never see your teenager these days? He's probably up in his room, winking.) As you'd expect, it's all wrapped up in the kind of huge lurid skinnable UI that will have Alan Cooper wandering around the Redmond campus with a rifle.

The Threedegrees beta went live a few hours ago and I, the mad, risk-loving fool, hurried for this new plaything — pausing only to marvel at the "Gosh We're Wacky!" section, blessed with all the carefree embarrassment skills of the middle-aged uncle.

This screencap from the installer should tell you all you need to know:

(No, I didn't draw those scrawls onto the image. It really does look like that.)

I don't know which of the scenarios I'm imagining is worse: The one where a crazed developer with MS Paint gets that past QA, or the one where the design team achieves group consensus to prove they're the gang that's down with the kids.

As you can see, the kids have to be down with installing a metric arseload of supporting extras before they can get jiggy with the winking action. This includes MSN Messenger 5.0 and the MS Black Ops P2P Infiltrator. I had a brief bout of swearing when MSNIM 5 started up because it was clearly ignoring my preference to hide the never-used info tabs on the left. Investigation showed I was wrong; it hadn't so much ignored my preference as removed the option entirely. Clearly, being able to view Expedia travel deals in a 100-pixel-wide buddy list is too important a feature to ever be turned off. Dammit, if you can't get stock price alerts, the terrorists have already won! Also, the banner slot at the bottom was refusing to budge, proudly displaying an ad telling me to use the app that was displaying it.

It's part of a worrying trend MS have been displaying recently that I'll call (for want of something wittier) feature-creep-away. Version 7.0 of Windows Media Player (a.k.a The Huge Blue Useless One) removed the ability to install .mov support. Now the latest version has removed streaming MP3 and AVI support (i.e. play during download). The lockdown has started. It's more than just "Trusted Computing"; they're trying to be Apple '90.

Anyway, now that ThreeDegrees is finally installed, I can have a play. Except I can't, because MSN IM can't see the Internet. Oops, neither can Internet Explorer. The problem persists after a reboot. Most apps (including Mozilla and Trillian, thankfully) can browse quite happily, but those that use some magic MS voodoo instead of normal DNS lookups are scuppered. Most irritatingly, this group includes Soulseek. (Using IP addresses in MSIE seems to work fine) A wander through the innards of XP shows that the Undergound MS P2P so-beta-it's-alpha has installed all kinds of IPv6 randomness into Services including a firewall and a "6to4 translator". I turn all of them off, but to no avail. I'm glad that MS is building a road to the future, but I am now one with the tarmac. Still, it could be worse.

If this gets fixed, someone let me know. I want to check ThreeDegrees out so I can pretend to be Clay and make wise, chin-stroking pronouncements about the social networks young people create. Also, I'd quite like to be able to use MSIE again. Probably. In the meantime, I'm joining the eight-year-olds swapping warez and pr0n on IRC. Seeya!

UPDATE: The headline on the front page of threedegrees.com reads: "For the people, by the People. Our community is built upon our art, expressions, and individuality." Yeah, and your Shared Source promotes innovation and is freer than the GPL. Oh, just fuck off!

FURTHER UPDATE: The adventure continues here.

Posted by Yoz at February 25, 2003 04:53 AM | TrackBack

Comments

I tried to read the wacky 'bios' section on their site, but it appeared to be written in something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike English.

And yes, one of them is titled 'Code Monkey'.

Nice. What's next? Graphics Whore? Production Slag?

Posted by: Jim on February 25, 2003 02:44 PM

SERVICE PACK 1?!?!! you cant install that unless you have a registered copy of XP.. oh well.

Posted by: Me on February 25, 2003 04:02 PM

my title at work is "sql monkey"

i think it's self-deprecating and okay--not trying to be hipper-than-thou indie rock like the bio contents

but then again, i'm not a teenager anymore--maybe they dig that shiznit

Posted by: monkeyboi on February 25, 2003 04:19 PM

it's a misnomer right ? shouldn't it be called third degrees ?

Posted by: herr k on February 25, 2003 04:38 PM

I love the "better listen, i hear they have good lawyers" wittiness at the bottom of their site by the copyright. Don't mess with us kid, we'll sue your ass! Nice.

Posted by: andrew on February 25, 2003 05:41 PM

To uninstall the IP6 crud, try ipv6 -uninstall at a command prompt.

Posted by: Jeremy on February 25, 2003 06:51 PM

It does indeed look dubious to the uninitiated bystander, but is it fair to trash 3Degrees before you've even tried the program itself? Best practice (in the Debian GNU/Linux world, at least) says that packaging issues are strictly separated from application issues.

I'm going to try this out next month when I get access to a Microsoft Windows setup, and will post my experiences somewhere.

Posted by: Richard Weber on February 26, 2003 08:03 PM

from: http://radio.weblogs.com/0100529/2003/02/25.html#a1509

netsh.exe interface ipv6 uninstall

Posted by: Anon on February 26, 2003 08:15 PM

Our DBA @work has programmed the phone system to come up as Mr. DBA. Always good for a chuckle.

Thanks for the "lockdown has started" bit, pointing out the lack of MP3 and MOV support. Easy to miss that kind of thing.

Posted by: Jeff Winkler on February 26, 2003 11:15 PM

"Key politicians chided universities on Wednesday for not doing enough to limit peer-to-peer piracy, calling unauthorized copying a federal crime that should be punished appropriately."

Congress is targeting P2P crimes now, starting with schools:

http://news.com.com/2100-1028-986143.html?tag=fd_top

One has got to be really dumb to use any P2P software from Microsoft. Especially something that is so obviously a RIAA HONEYPOT.

Microsoft is one of the key players behind the crackdown on IP 'crimes'.

And with the usage rights for intellectual property being very limited and as clear as mud, why risk using Microsoft's software and getting reported to the FBI?

The penalty for IP crime under the DMCA is a felony, including up to $250,000 fine and 5 years in federal prison.

I'd get all that P2P crap off my machine if I were you. Who knows what it is doing while you are away from your computer.

Posted by: Anon on February 27, 2003 12:02 AM

So children, the fire is coming....soon...soon.
just ask the MPA/NASCAP
just ask them about sony and phillips....

Just ask m-soft why it won't support mp3???

maybe...a violation of us and international law that they can't lie or buy their way out of.

Watch sony swat m-soft like a bug.

See those silly little Japanese geee why do so many of them run open source?????

Posted by: Howler on February 27, 2003 10:29 AM

I'm not sure i understand the comment on the lack of streaming MP3 support. I'm sitting here right now listening to a streaming mp3 station through Winmedia 9. The inability to save stations in any form other than urls in the history list sucks, but other than that it works fine and sounds great.

Posted by: mburns on March 1, 2003 03:23 AM

In the version of MSNIM I was using the other day on Win2K, the option for hiding tabs had been renamed to something bizarre like "This is a shared computer, hide my tabs." _Microsoft: we can't do security for shit, but at least nobody will know what tabs you use!_ Incidentally, I love that guy "Tripp[MS]" on the threedegrees board whose signature includes two occurrences of """. Nice and professional. Oh, and also: "feature leak"?

Posted by: Earle Martin on March 2, 2003 12:55 PM

The quotes are from the standard community disclamer, its the stupid messageboard which warps them into & quot ; which I have nothing to do with.

Posted by: Tripp on March 4, 2003 07:31 AM

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Posted by: psychiatric on January 25, 2006 07:48 AM