MegaBytes

The other day I received a request from another Vancouver Observer columnist to be my Facebook friend. I turned him down.

I’m sure he’s a nice guy. His columns are well-written and interesting. But I’ve never met him; never corresponded with him; never talked to him on the phone. We don’t share any personal experiences or memories. So how can he be a friend of mine?

I realize that the word “friend” as used by Facebook is different from how I use it. On Facebook, a “friend” is anyone who you give permission to share your personal information. To me, a friend is someone with whom I have bonded in some way -- as one dictionary definition puts it, “a person you know well and regard with affection and trust”.

Because of this clash between Facebook’s and my own definition of friend, I don’t have many Facebook friends. I have no desire to share information, gripes, updates and observations with casual acquaintances, people who went to the same schools I did or participated in the same social activist causes. Sorry, if you’re not a friend of mine in real life, you’re not going to be my friend on Facebook.

A couple of reasons for this:

The ban on non-hands-free cellphones in cars has been in place for more than two weeks now, and in another few weeks, the police will start actively enforcing the law by slapping fines on drivers yakking or texting while behind the wheel.

But the New York Times has come out with a timely reminder about another hazard of our distracted age -- pedestrians using mobile devices while walking.

You see them everywhere. Gazing down at their phone while punching in a number; stumbling into the road while grooving to tunes. According to the Times, “pedestrians using their phones do not notice objects or people that are right in front of them”. It’s no joke. Emergency room visits caused by preoccupied pedestrians are on the rise. And, with the growing ubiquity of smartphones and their myriad applications, it can only get worse.

Good news for those of us who rely on public transit in metro Vancouver; TransLink has upgraded its Trip Planner web application.

Before TransLink upgraded the application, Trip Planner was useful but sometimes aggravating. The way it was supposed to work, you entered your start point and end point (with options for time of arrival or departure, shortest time or least number of transfers), hit enter and presto! the application would tell you how to get to where you’re going.

But it had its annoyances. Enter “Street” instead of “St” and it would get confused. Enter an address such as 985 Fake Street, Vancouver, and it would reply, “do you mean 985 Flakey Street, New Westminster or 985 Fake Street, Vancouver?” Even when there was only one choice, the app would ask you whether that address was the one you wanted.

A googol is the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeroes, or 10 to the power of 100. It's fitting that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page chose to name their company after this incomprehensibly large number. With Google rolling out new applications, services and now hardware at such a dizzying pace, maybe it won’t be long until there’s a googol of Google products.

The latest, of course, is the Nexus One, a mobile phone that Googol announced yesterday. It’s not just a smartphone, it’s a superphone (which has led to numerous jokes, including one about how the superphone has to go into a phone booth to change into its secret identity). Google is a bit hazy about the difference between a smartphone and a superphone, merely saying the Nexus One is “as powerful as your laptop computer of three to four years ago”.