• Apple’s included Nokia 3G modem script hasn’t been updated for 3.5G technologies such as HSDPA — if you use your phone in tethered mode via either Bluetooth or USB, your speed will max out around ~300kbps.
• Apple changed the format for modem scripts in 10.5, so the previous HSDPA scripts from Ross Barkman won’t work.

Using the developer tools and iSync Plugin Maker.app, I was able to update Barkman’s script to work in Leopard. My preliminary tests are getting ~750kbps in my apartment with so-so signal reception from AT&T. Woo! (Now if only Nokia would make a QWERTY version, so I didn’t have to carry around both this and a Blackberry…)

You can grab my updated modem script here: NokiaHSDPA.zip

Just dump it in /Library/Modem Scripts and then follow one of the many existing setup guides for either bluetooth or USB tethering, making sure to select the new HSDPA device instead of the 3G device from the Nokia category.

Now that the cranky rant is over, I’ll try to actually be helpful. Here are some handy-dandy tips on Giving Good IM in a Workplace Environment:

1. Be specific: Context is valuable. Bad: “hey did u see http://ambiguousurl.com/72d7a8f?” Good: “Hey, have you seen Bob Blowhard’s latest blog post on our product? (http://ambiguousurl.com/72d7a8f). If not, you should check it out, it has some good commentary on the XYZ feature!”
2. Get to the point: If you are IM’ing because have something to ask, just ask. Don’t make “small talk” first, I’m going to be spending he entire time wondering what you’re working up to anyhow.
3. Exercise good timing: If my status message says “In a meeting,” then a message like “What time are you getting out?” may be appropriate. “What are your detailed thoughts on the implications of yesterday’s reorg on our marketplace strategy for Q3?” is not.
4. No reply necessary: Very uncommon, but people will love you if you do this. If you’re just passing on a piece of information and don’t need confirmation, let someone know they don’t need to reply, and save them a few seconds.
5. Quick queries only: My general guideline is that anything that will require someone to think for more than two seconds in order to answer is probably not appropriate for IM.

People have strong existing workflows to handling incoming email. Filters, folders, flags, et al. allow the recipient to delegate the incoming flow of information and respond to it in a way that works best for them. Instant messages “jump the queue” people have set up, so while it can be a powerful medium for lightweight communication, be considerate of helping keep people from becoming overloaded.

Do you have any other tips for dealing with IMs? Post them in the comments, perhaps I’ll compile a list of reader contributions.

…And we would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!

(with apologies to the Dove Evolution campaign)

Pinky and blue-y!

Lost Sensations, originally uploaded by | HD |.

Woo:

“Creative Director Jenny Lam expanded the search to Flickr and contacted people who took really interesting pictures, asking them, “So, how would you like one of your photos included among the default wallpapers in Windows Vista?” The Flickr artists were excited to be a part of Windows Vista (one of them by an astonishing coincidence happened to be a beta tester), and after the lawyers had their say—because nothing is complete without lawyers getting involved—Microsoft sent the photographers on a commissioned photo shoot.”

From The Old New Thing.

Officially, the new feature is called Mute Thread, or “Mute” for short. Here’s how it works:

THE OLD WAY:
1) You’re reading some posts about the elections.
2) You were once excited about reading this stuff.
3) But at least one conversation is now on its 471th message. You keep hitting Archive but the damn conversation keeps popping up every time someone makes a new post!
4) You’re ready to tear out your hair. The posters’ hair. Your keyboard’s hair. Er, keys.
5) MAKE IT STOP! MAKE IT STOP, PLEEEEEASE!

THE NEW WAY:
1) You get yet another annoying message in the same damn conversation that’s already been conversed to death.
2) You press the ‘m’ key. Unless a message is written *directly* to you (e.g., your name is in the TO spot), you’ll never see that message in your inbox again!

That description courtesy of Google’s Adam Lasnik. My description would be something along the lines of “For when you can’t stop other people from beating a dead horse, at least you don’t have to watch.” For me, this small feature is the most innovative Gmail has added yet–it’s the small attention to detail that shows they are closely looking at fixing the daily problems people encounter with their social usage of email, not just big line-item “features.”

Amusingly enough, his example is the precise instance of the latest reason why I really want this feature. I’m on a medium-volume mailing list that I typically enjoy reading, but it occasionally gets obliterated by an extremely high-volume, low-value, highly-obnoxious thread. The most recent thread that did this? Yep, election discussions.

Somebody turn this into a Thunderbird extension, please!

Heather and I co-wrote a post for Flickr Blog, so I’ll keep this one short.

I think it was somewhere around 3am, while I was making the rounds passing out free Red Bull to appreciative hackers (Leonard and I made a middle of the night run to and buy out an entire store’s inventory), that I realized how much I love working where I do.

Oh yeah, Beck rocked. (And his puppets sure like to rub some felt…)

Photos by bitmapr, stewart, laughingsquid, mroth, and flickrjo. See also interesting photos tagged “hackday06″ on Flickr.

While the rest of the schedule hasn’t been posted yet, you can be assured it’s going to be fun. Really fun. (Well, it’ll help if you’re at least a little bit nerdy… but that describes about 98% of the Bay Area population.) We’ve got some big surprises lined up, but the coolest stuff will likely be the things we don’t anticipate at all — HackDay has this way of having insanely fun stuff just emerge, ad-hoc and unplanned.

I’ll be there, along with a few other members of the Flickr team, and am very much looking forward to seeing all the interesting and novel hacks people will come up with. If you’re interested in attending, I strongly remind you to register right away, since space is going to be quite limited.

But pageviews aren’t just a poor technical solution to measuring engagement due to rich interfaces — they’re also a fundamentally flawed way of looking at user engagement on participatory media / social software websites. What’s the comparative value of a user who spends two hours a day on your site passively browsing various media content, versus a user who spends twenty minutes a week on the site, but spends that time uploading interesting content and/or actively commenting on other people’s work? I’d argue the second user is not only more engaged but also more valuable to the website (and their advertisers) in the long-run.

If you have tried out the feature yet, below is an example of what it looks like — here’s a screenshot I took last night while browsing photos taken on Alcatraz:

For me, the most exciting part of this technology — especially as a social technologist / researcher — will be seeing what new and unexpected uses the vibrant user community will produce in short order. I’m a firm believer that the users themselves will almost always come up with more interesting and compelling uses of technology than the inventors: that’s one of the philosophies that drives me to be involved in this field, and it’s always exciting to watch the new uses of a technology emerge and (sometimes) stabilize. By bringing geotagging to the masses (others did it first, but not in a mass-market way), Flickr has now become, in under 24 hours, the premiere source of data for studying how real-world people use geotagging technology.

Speaking of new and unexpected uses of technology, if you’re a hacker in the Bay Area, be sure to sign up for the first external Yahoo! HackDay / Camp. It’s sure to be a blast — come make a Flickr geo hack that will blow us away.

Update: There’s now an official FlickrBlog post about this, and the Geo APIs are released for shenanigans.