Qashqarian

If you like chat rooms where you can chat anonymously with different people from around the world on a huge variety of topics, then Paltalk may interest you. Note that Paltalk is also confusingly known as PaltalkScene and on Mac and Linux, where it only works in a web browser, it’s also known as PaltalkExpress.

Paltalk is a US based service that claims to have over 4 million users. One of the biggest attractions of Paltalk to those users is that you can log on at any time, activate your webcam, and chat away in high quality audio and video. A few years ago however, Paltalk hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons after a British user committed suicide online after receiving a barrage of insults in an “Insult” chat room. Since then, Paltalk have placed greater restrictions on adult content and added an adult content blocker switch to the top of the interface which you can activate at any time.

Let’s take a look at the Windows version first then. When you first install Paltalk, note that it will try and install the Paltalk toolbar but you can easily de-select this. You also need to sign-up for a Paltalk account which simply involves entering a username and password:

Once you are logged-in, Paltalk open as an Instant Message style client sidebar. There are three options - Click with your clique, Chat face-to-face and More fun stuff:

It’s best to start with Click with your clique and then select Browse chat rooms when the option appears. There are a huge number of chat rooms to choose from with topics ranging from sport to politics. Note that one of them takes you to an adult chat room although this is clearly la labeled and as mentioned earlier, you can deactivate all adult content on Paltalk by using the Adult Content switch in the top right corner.

Once in a chat room, you can choose to activate your webcam or even transmit audio to other users. Although the users can be from anywhere, the topics of chat rooms suggest that most users are in the USA.

Paltalk is quite an overwhelming application because there are ads all over the place and more often than not, you enter a room only to hear music or ranting from a user. Note that you can see who is speaking by where the microphone symbol is next to the names of people in the chat room down the right hand side. More often than not however, the messages that are exchanged are just a jumbled mass of random soundbites and its hard to tell how anyone can be genuinely communicating within such an environment. You can though open a private dialog with someone by right clicking on their name. You can also have multiple chat rooms open in different tabs.

The interface on the PC version is a little cheap for my liking and the web version (PaltalkExpress for Mac and Linux) looks much better:

The chat dialogs are also far more polished and easier to use than in the Windows version too:

Paltalk is a hugely popular application and if you like talking and webcam chatting with random people on different topics then you’re sure to enjoy it. Be aware however that it is all a bit much to take-in at once and it will take some time before you feel competent with it.

A while ago, I reviewed a program called AdBlock Plus, a popular Firefox add-on that nukes the annoying ads that get in the way when you’re browsing. It is super-effective, stripping ads from the screen and leaving only clean, white space in their place. As anyone who has ever spent more than 30 seconds on the internet knows, you’ll soon be assaulted by blinking, buzzing and flashing ads, my personal favorites being the ones that slide out and cover whatever it is you’re trying to read.

I thought AdBlock Plus was really cool and gave it a great rating, but just the other day I read this article by Ars Technica which made me stop and think. Could blocking ads be hurting my favorite websites?

Once you think about it, it’s obvious that websites that don’t charge for content have to make money some other way. One of these ways is advertising, and if we get rid of that advertising with an ad blocker, it can’t generate the revenue that maintains the website. As the article points out, some argue that they never click on ads anyway, so there’s no harm in getting rid of them. Well, the truth is that many large websites are paid by advertisers on a per view basis, not per click. Surely once you realize that, it changes everything.

I wonder how many people will get rid of their AdBlock Plus after reading the Ars Technica article? There’s a problem here, and its the same one I see when people get into the illegal download debate. We have spent a long time taking full advantage of the internet and all the free and accessible stuff it offers, and old habits are hard to break. The internet broke into the mainstream more than 15 years ago, but back then content providers, vendors and producers didn’t think of the future and what would happen if they gave users (or allowed them to take) their products for free.

Most users don’t think of the consequences unless we’re made to - downloading, watching and reading online are too ingrained. You turn on your computer and there it is. We expect to get lots of our content for free and see nothing wrong with sweeping ads aside in order to get it. Likewise, if users feel that advertising is too intrusive, for example, they don’t think twice about complaining. But think about it: it’s a bit like being invited around to somebody’s house for dinner and then complaining about the food.

If content providers want people’s attitudes towards paying (however they do - or don’t- do it) for their content to change, it’s going to take a lot of effort. An internet-wide change would never work, so it is going to require the long, hard slog of educating users and appealing to their better nature. Do you think it will work?

During the summer, Gmail increased its maximum attachment size to 25MB, up 5MB on its previous limit. Great news, I hear you cry - now you can squeeze a few more photos into that email or send an album in 2 parts rather than 3!

Well yes, you can, but does that mean you should?

One thing you have to remember about email is that it’s old. Really old. Although it mightn’t feel it, email has been around for more than 30 years and, unlike other technologies, it hasn’t been updated much. This doesn’t have much of an impact on our day-to-day use, but like they say over at the Google Operating System blog, “…sending a large attachment via email is relocating using the U.S. Postal Service as your moving company. It is painful, limited, and expensive.” It will get the job done, but it’s not the most efficient way.

So what’s the alternative? Well, if you are in physical contact with your recipient, you could just put the file on a memory stick. Once you follow the basic security principles, it’s a very simple way of transferring data. Obviously, this only works if you are geographically close to the recipient. In fact, email’s ability to overcome this problem is one of the reasons it became so popular. Just because it’s popular, though, doesn’t make it the best, so have a think about using free web hosting services instead. Don’t worry if it sounds complicated - you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

Go to a free hosting site - Mediafire and Hotshare are two well-known ones - and upload the file in question, just like you would attach it to an email. With 200MB of space usually available, it has a significant advantage over the now elderly email. Once it is uploaded, the service will give you a link, which you email to your friend. Your friend clicks on the link, and downloads the file that you uploaded. If it sounds complicated, it’s only because I have detailed every step - do it once or twice and it will become second nature.

Even though it’s not the most efficient way, you might still have your reasons for wanting to send larger files by email. If you do, you’ll need to make them smaller, and there’s two ways of doing this. You can compress (or ‘zip’) them, or divide them into smaller files. Either way, you’ll need a tool to do this, and the recipient will need a similar tool to decompress or re-join. IZArc and 7-Zip are two reliable - and free - file compression and decompression utilities. Likewise, in the area of file splitting, you’ve got plenty of choice. Even though they’re not pretty (and show little imagination in the name stakes), HJSplit and Gsplit are both fuss-free methods of chopping those unwieldy files down to size.

Special Thanks to: Niamh Lynch