So why then, in the age of smart phones, smart cars and a global GDP of 60 trillion dollars, are payment systems so broken? If you’re skeptical that there’s actually a problem, walk into the store nearest you and try to buy something. Did you use a bank card? I bet for the vast majority of you the experience went something like this:

Are you going to use that as Credit?  Okay, just go ahead and push that big red Cancel Button.

I’m sorry, what?  The vast majority of day to day financial transactions at the consumer level are initiated by pushing… the cancel button. The red one.

The fact that we, as a people, are almost daily subjected to a verbal tutorial on the proper use of card readers is an astonishing statement about the usability of these devices. I probably spend more time listening to someone explain to me how to swipe my debit card than all other face-to-face instruction combined.

To start, the email comes off as written by something of a megalomaniac (which increases his chances of reading this, right?). Mr. Parker drops the word Napster in his email a staggering 16 times.  That’s just shy of 1% for you keyword saturation nerds.  And it becomes immediately clear that in Sean Parker’s world Napster was the last reasonable way to share and listen to music until Spotify launched.  Here’s some of what he has to say about the competition that bridged the two (admittedly groundbreaking) services:

For obvious reasons, none of the decentralized P2P products (Kazaa, etc) could ever approach the usability of Napster.

The subscription products were doomed to fail on all counts due to annoying DRM

The pay-per-download products (iTunes, etc) still don’t take into account the way people really consume music: they have priced themselves out of the market

all of these products have lacked the basic usability (speed/responsiveness) that the world came to expect from Napster!

I’m certainly not going to say that any of these services lacked major problems, but it’s absurd to completely disregard them because of their obvious flaws when each platform came with major innovations of it’s own.  What’s immediately obvious about each of the systems tossed aside in his email is that they were all insanely popular with users at their respective peaks. What’s also worth pointing out is that Napster itself was a joke from a user experience point of view.  (he himself makes reference to Napster’s “messy interface” on page two of the email).  People used it not because of how wonderful it was, but because it was the only viable choice at the time, which was the case with many of the services mentioned.

So while all of this stuff is just kind of annoying at face value, what it seems to answer is a question that has nagged at me for years.  Why did Facebook never properly compete with MySpace when it came to music?  Music was one of MySpace’s strong points.  It is one of the few remaining reasons the service hasn’t been shut down entirely. Don’t get me wrong, it’s 2011.  MySpace doesn’t matter.  It’s not a threat to anybody, least of all Facebook. But I’m not talking about 2011.  I’m talking about 2004 & 2005 when Sean Parker was arguably one of the most influential people inside Facebook itself.  Why would one of the forefathers of social music sharing let such a major opportunity slip by?  His email answers some of these questions.

Most of these deals would have resulted in the wrong user experience and I’ve done my best to stop them where they didn’t make sense.

rather than dive in again, I adopted a “watch and wait” philosophy

as I mentioned we’ve already passed on iTunes, LaLa,etc.

In today’s climate the pressure to ship a product is often highlighted as being paramount to everything, profit and feature refinement included.  What seems likely here is that to Sean Parker, Napster was his rush to the market.  It was the most innovative music tool around, and existed in that state for just a few short years before being overtaken by legal threats and competition alike.

Facebook almost certainly missed something in finding itself wrapped up in his patience.  But none of that is likely to matter now.  Facebook excelled everywhere else, destroyed its competition (able-bodied in music sharing or otherwise) and is in a prime position to make partnerships to integrate the features and products of ships that have already sailed.  And what of Sean Parker now, two years after he wrote the words that are today being scrutinized both here and elsewhere around the web?  His email led to a seat on Spotify’s board, he made a significant financial investment in the company, and he has a direct channel to the ears of those who are leading the next social music revolution.

]]> http://binaryorganic.com/2011/10/09/where-was-facebook-music-in-2004-being-excessively-patient/feed/ 1 http://binaryorganic.com/2011/09/26/fight-google-or-use-their-services-pick-one-not-both/ http://binaryorganic.com/2011/09/26/fight-google-or-use-their-services-pick-one-not-both/#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:34:22 +0000 daniel http://binaryorganic.com/?p=351 Google’s Eric Shmidt had barely finished convincing Congress that his company wasn’t on a monopolistic warpath hellbent on world domination when I came across the “consumer advocacy” site fairsearch.org.  This is basically a group of folks who claim that Google is bad for consumers.  This group of folks, I should mention, stand to directly lose money if Google’s growing product offerings continue to be successful.  The Fair Search about page is signed by the likes of Microsoft, Travelocity, Hotwire and others, all of them essentially making the argument that, since you, the consumer, overwhelmingly use Google Search to find things, the Government should use various laws and regulations to ensure that Google gives their companies a fair shake in it’s results.

I want to touch on two points here.  First, one of the two essential principals the Fair Search group believe in is Innovation (they used all capitals on their page, but I didn’t want to shout). Specifically that…

Consumers benefit when competition in the marketplace forces companies to continue to innovate and develop the best solutions for online search.

Yet instead of competing with Google and developing a better product, these folks are advocating regulation, Antitrust hearings, and fiddling with their direct competitor’s search results to make them look like they’re competing better than they are.

Let me be very clear.  I am far from a traditional capitalist.  I am not with the Tea People.  I just happen to think that people use Google’s web site because it is better than most other web sites.  Better products really can, and do, win in the online space.  There was a time when you could say that MySpace had a monopoly on social sharing, but a better product wiped them out.  You could have once said that Microsoft had a clear monopoly on email, but better products have gained serious ground.  Hell, you could to this day argue that Microsoft still has a monopoly in the browser space that is a holdover from their own victory in the Antitrust space (Better products, again, are changing this as well).

Why do people use Google?  Why is it better than the current alternative offerings?  I’m sure that, as a Google user yourself, you can probably think of a couple.  As a web designer and front-end developer I’ll mention a few that are relevant to me.

First, I can tell you off the top of my head (i.e. without Googling it) that a nice fellow by the name of Matt Cutts runs the web spam team at Google.  Who runs the spam team at Microsoft?  No idea.  Who ran it at Yahoo?  No Idea.  My point here is that Spam is one of the biggest problems facing search quality.  Search relevance is probably one of the biggest reasons Google is losing market share to Social, and Matt Cutts and his team work their asses off to let us know what’s appropriate behavior and what isn’t.  He’s constantly answering questions, posting videos, and working to explain what Google is doing to improve the quality of search results.

The point is not Matt Cutts.  The point is that Google has a huge set of resources available that is dedicated to teaching people how to make relevant websites findable to their user base.  In addition to the kind of outreach that the spam team does, there’s Google’s Webmaster Tools, Analytics, hosted font & code libraries & more, all aimed at helping relevant users find good content (and sell ads, but that’s an argument I’ll leave for the Fair Search people, mmkay?).  Does Microsoft have similar tools?  Sure, but I don’t know anybody that uses them.  They amount to what feels like a bunch of loosely connected help documentation and a couple of scripts to show that they’re trying.

This brings me around to point number two (I said there would be two a while back, didn’t I?). I’d like to present some less than empirical evidence that proves Google’s superiority as a product.  To do so, just for a few laughs, I’d like to refer to the source code of the fairsearch.org site itself.  The folks who argue that their products are just as good as Google and the world would realize it if only that damned Sergey Brin would stop fiddling with results has got some explaining to do, because apparently fairsearch.org couldn’t come up with a better way to host JQuery or gather traffic data about their site, so they used Google.

Line 13 and 16 in the code sample above make identical requests to pull a copy of the JQuery library from Google’s Content Delivery Network.  This is a free service Google offers to speed up and increase the reliability of script transfers for website owners.  And then, if you scroll down to the bottom of the fairsearch.org source code, you’ll see that they’re using Google Analytics to monitor traffic to the site.  This, again, is from the source code of a company claiming that Google is evil and should be reigned in so that their equally wonderful tools can get a fair chance to succeed in the marketplace.

Almost all of the companies that make up the fair search alliance, I should note, are incredibly well indexed in Google itself.  I’m Googling as I type, and you should get similar results, but obviously your mileage may vary.  Googling flight search displays kayak.com (a fairsearch company) as #1.  Google.com/flights is #2.  Googling hotel search reveals Travelocity, Expedia and Kayak in 4 of the top 5 slots (all of them are fairsearch companies).  And finally, Googling the word search shows Bing as #1 (again, a fairsearch company).

I think it’s fairly obvious that the folks that built the fairsearch.org site are relying on Google’s webmaster resources because they’re good.  And I’d be willing to place a sizeable bet that Kayak or Travelocity or any of the other sales-based fair search companies (sorry, Bing) get the vast majority of their non-paid search traffic from Google’s organic search results.  Maybe somebody at one of those companies can share me on their Google Analytics to prove me wrong.

The original version of the site was essentially titles only in it’s default view, providing more information in a popup on click. Scrolling through time was quite well done using this method, but it was easy to feel overwhelmed by a jumble of headings shooting past with no real context to work with prior to clicking on something. Now all the content is visible by default, and while this produces quite a long page that would take a while to sift through, I’ve added some basic filtering options in the sidebar so you can now sort events by category or year (sorting is something the original site lacked entirely).

Content-wise, things are obviously far from complete. Please contribute. You can find the project on github, or I can always be reached by contacting me here on the site.

This is an example of the original timeline script (taken from fordroad.net)

This is the current version of the site.

Wasn’t QWERTY a bad idea from the start?

The traditional QWERTY keyboard layout has been targeted as one of the roadblocks hindering mobile keyboard development.  Some of the problems date back to the invention of the typewriter itself.  The layout of the keyboard lends itself primarily as the solution to a mechanical problem that, with the onset of computers, hasn’t been an issue for decades.  The very first typewriters used layouts that caused the typebars to jam as a result of commonly coupled letter strings being placed to closely together.  There is talk that Remington further tinkered with the layout (moving the “R” key to the top row) so that the word “typewriter” could quickly be spelled by salesman trying to show off how easy to use the devices were.

But these initial design limitations actually do very little to hinder typing speeds on full size keyboards.  While the design has certainly been challenged over the years, the more pressing concern is certainly one of available screen real estate.  Phones are small.  Hands are big.  End of Story.

So let’s just agree on a new standard keyboard layout.

Replacing QWERTY has proved easier said then done. The DVORAK keyboard layout was implemented as a direct response to many of the critisisms of QWERTY. Based on research and data rather than marketing and mechanical workarounds, DVORAK handled key placement so that the same finger would rarely press consecutive keys, and also moved the most commonly used characters to the home row. Both of these are said to improve typing efficiency and reduce some of the stress and fatigue associated with typing.

The problem, of course, was that QWERTY already completely dominated the keyboard landscape. Everyone who typed was already comfortable with the old system. Hardware and software alike were manufactured to assume QWERTY would be used. While DVORAK certainly enjoys a small cult following, it never has, and likely never will, catch on in a meaningful way.

Nevertheless, the possibility for dethroning QWERTY has once again taken hold. The ease of developing software keyboards for touch screens has a minimal cost of entry compared to the monumental task of designing, manufacturing, and marketing a hardware alternative.  Two notable examples of alternate keyboard layouts that cater to the mobile space are FrogPad and 8Pen.

FrogPad actually started as a hardware keyboard and now has touch screen versions available for some platforms.  What makes FrogPad worth mentioning is that it was designed to be used with one hand, which makes it incredibly useful in the mobile space.  They have a bluetooth model (which is currently out of stock and is supposedly undergoing design revisions before a relaunch) that connects to many popular smartphones wirelessly.  The user types on the keyboard with one hand, while holding their phone in the other.

8pen, the other example I’ll cite that’s using a non-standard key layout is quite a bit different than what people are used to indeed.  Letters are laid out on a segmented grid (an X, essentially).  This one’s got a bit of a steep learning curve, so I’ll let the video do most of the talking with regard to how to actually use it.  The benefits of 8pen are simple enough to understand.  First, your finger doesn’t leave the screen until it is finished with a word.  There is no “typing” per say.  This gives a kind of scripted feel to writing that I honestly haven’t felt truly comfortable with since grade school.   Second, if (and this is a big if) you can actually find yourself able to adapt to a foreign keyboard layout, this is probably the first successful deployment of a touch screen keyboard that you can use without constantly looking at the keyboard.

While both of these examples are innovative, quirky, and have a reasonable chance of increasing efficiency, they both take time to learn.  The trouble with software (especially at the mobile level) is that nobody has any time to learn anything.  If it doesn’t work in a natural way that makes sense for people out of the box, they’re never going to take the time to learn how to use it in a way that actually gets around to saving anybody any actual frustration.  My conclusion?  Non-QWERTY keyboard layouts are great to play around with, but have probably set out to slay a giant that has no intention of being slain.

If we’re stuck with QWERTY, what are our options?

If alternate keyboard layouts aren’t your thing, how can QWERTY be brought into the modern touch screen landscape in a usable way?  Swype is one such solution.  With Swype, the user simply drags their fingers from letter to letter and raises their finger from the screen when they are done typing.  Speed is increased by removing the need to lift your finger between letters, by not needing to use the space bar and also by way of the increased accuracy that happens naturally when dragging your finger across the screen as opposed to trying to poke at individual keys as is the case with traditional touch screen tapping.

And just for a quick peak at what’s likely around the corner, we have BlindType.  This is the only mobile keyboard layout mentioned in this post that hasn’t actually been used by consumers yet.  It seems that the developers were back at the drawing board ironing out some final engineering issues when Google swooped down out of nowhere and acquired them.  If that doesn’t speak to the notion that these guys were on to something, I don’t know what does.  Anyhow, BlindType dynamically changes the size and orientation of the keyboard depending on how a user is typing.  The argument seems to be that errors happening from individual key misses are merely symptoms of a larger problem.  Most keyboards address the problem of typing by trying to make it easier for the user to hit the right key.  BlindType seems to be moving the keyboard around under your fingers, so you can go on typing as poorly as ever, but with far less mistakes.

The 800 pound Gorrilla

So we’ve got traditional keyboard layouts that have a number of crippling problems when they are brought into the mobile space, and we see the (quite probably failed) attempts at remedying these problems with non standard layouts.  Now, with the implementation of things like Swype and BlindType, it is becoming apparent that QWERTY might have been given a new lease on life.  But even if someone perfects QWERTY so that I could type 50 words per minute with my phone behind my back, it still seems likely that none of these solutions are going to be the standard in one or two generations time.  What we’re witnessing with this rampant desire to replace the keyboard with a better keyboard is little more than an effort to plug the generational gap that exists between a population that has always had, used, and liked the benefits of a traditional keyboard and a generation that will be some day be raised on speech alone as their preferred method of input.  And just in case folks never quite get over talking to their devices in public, somebody smarter than me is working on standardizing thought itself as an input device at this very moment.

As it stands there are three main reasons you might hear somebody complain about Facebook.

Privacy:

This has been the debate that has sparked all the talk around the Interwebs about why Facebook is no longer a viable social networking platform.  Never mind that Twitter has been inherently public by design since the day that it launched.  Never mind that Facebook has gone to great (even if intentionally confusing) lengths to allow you to control how it handles the information you publish to its servers.  Even the Senate has weighed in on the utter seriousness of privacy on Facebook.  There are real debates going on right now that will shape the future of the Internet for generations to come and all the greater web surfing community can seem to talk about is whether or not Facebook is allowed to give you the option of sharing your data with others.  To me the whole argument of the privacy debacle on Facebook can be boiled down to one pretty obvious sentiment:  People don’t like the bait and switch.

lack of integration:

In the new world of social graphs and APIs, it would be a snap for facebook to cross-publish my status updates across multiple platforms (and vice versa), but the top level services don’t want to compete with each other on their own turf. Google buzz was recently accused of delaying twitter updates for the sole fact that letting users tweet in real time on Google’s platform would overwhelm their own service.

Proprietary Code:

Where there is freedom from standardization, there are constant reminders of why standardization was implemented in the first place.  While Facebook was smart to do away with custom tiling backgrounds and auto-playing audio tracks (not to mention the implementation of their vast application framework), the folks who have the time or interest in fighting for a replacement are folks who like to tinker.  Facebook may market themselves as an “open” company, but when it comes to making changes to the core product, the doors are shut.  This is not without good reason as far as Facebook is concerned.  You don’t have to look around long until you’ll find sympathy for the argument that the true mass market (as opposed to the leveraged influence of the tech-obsessed early adopters) could care less who’s in control, so long as it works and looks cool.

While these reasons are all well and good, there is still the little problem of adopting an alternative (not that something viable even exists to adopt quite yet).  Facebook has a lock on more than 400 million active users.  If they were a country, Facebook would be the third most populous in the world.  As I mentioned earlier, the shortcomings listed above can only really serve as a catalyst to get people talking about change.  Actively convincing people to move to another service is going to require actively promoting a new landscape, not filling in the holes people found in the old one.  So what does it take to convince an entire tribe of people to burn their Facebook flag and make land on a different network?  There are, believe it or not, a number of aspiring Facebook killers already looming on the horizon, and they all seem to share a few common threads.

The Next Facebook is open:

Nearly everyone talking about the future of social networking is also talking about some configuration of what is now referred to as the open stack.  This is a set of tools that, as Joseph Smarr puts it, take care of three basic concepts important to social networking:  Who I am, Who I know, and What’s Going On.  Using open technologies to establish these three things within any given social network ensure a number of things.  Some of the things possible using the open stack as a foundation for social networking include an identity that is owned by the individual (as opposed to the corporation) as well as data that is portable between networks (friends lists, contact information, timelines).

The Next Facebook is decentralized

Another trend that seems to be coming up quite a bit in the conversation about who our next social networking overlord might be has a lot to do with the fact that we don’t much care for the idea of overlords.  Enter the concept of distributed social networking.  Instead of a single website being responsible for managing all of the social data and connections out there, a distributed system envisions everybody taking responsibility for their own node on the network.  There are a number of different ways that this is being attempted (many of them are described in more detail below), but for a moment I’d like to look at a somewhat related example, so that we might be able to put the distributed model into terms that we are a bit more familiar with.  Picture for a moment the contrast between purchasing music from ITunes and downloading (pirating) it for free from a private Bit Torrent tracker.

On the one hand you have ITunes:

• Owned by a giant multinational corporation.
• Interested more in their bottom line than true consumer satisfaction.
• Chargers you more per song than you used to pay when you were actually receiving physical property for your dollar.
• Selection is limited to Apple’s private licensing deals

And on the other hand you have Bit Torrent:

• No true hierarchy
• Move easily from one  market to another
• Music works on all devices (no strings attached)
• Lets you listen to music without financial commitment (consumer decides how payment should be rendered, if at all).

Much in the same way that there were concrete benefits for consumers who moved away from traditional music sales, there are very similar benefits to taking control of your social identity away from corporate interests.  A distributed system has the potential to give users an unprecedented amount of control over how their data will be seen by others.  In addition, if you have full control over your social identity, it becomes easier to bring that information with you from place to place when and where you want it.  Some of the benefits of such a system include the following:

• No need to feel permanently committed to a single service
• Easily share your whole social identity with friends, not just service specific portions
• Bring your data with you to other sites/services without the need to ‘start over’
• It’s like Facebook, but open.

Why None of this will Fix Privacy:

The real irony in all of this is that should a Facebook coup really make any headway, the history books will name privacy as the number one reason for the groundswell that led to whatever replaces it.  Why is this ironic you ask?  Because none of this is likely to alleviate our concerns about privacy in a satisfying way.

Aggregation:

One of the most effective marketing tactics you are likely to see in an attempt to get you to move away from Facebook will be to offer a platform that allows you to continue to use Facebook.  This sort of setup, commonly referred to as aggregation, envisions a distributed system that simply allows you to pull some or all of your data from the myriad of sites you network on and manage them all from one place.  So now your friends can see your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. all by visiting your “node” on the distributed network.

While the distributed networking kids are taking security of these platforms very seriously, they seem to be looking over the fact that adding one very secure platform on top of countless others doesn’t really simplify your privacy setup, it complicates it.  In this kind of distributed system, my Flickr sets are still stored on Yahoo’s servers, my status updates are still sitting at Facebook, and so on.  If Facebook decides to change my privacy settings in the dark of the night, I’m still going to have to deal with that just the same as I do today.

Bugs and Fixes:

One nice thing about Facebook is that they sort of handle security for you.  When a bug lets people monitor your “private” chats with your friends or something totally absurd like that Facebook takes chat offline, fixes the problem , and you probably never even knew there was an issue.  Many of the systems being worked on today are self-hosted software platforms.  Much like people download and install WordPress to their own servers to manage a blog, people would download and install software that would let them manage their own node on the social network.

I only use the WordPress example above because we would undoubtedly see the same kind of security troubles popping up on our social networking nodes as we do now across the blogosphere.  Self-Hosted networking software would need to be updated.  By people.  Who have shit to do.  Wordpress sites get hacked or maimed in magnificently large numbers every day (Certainly not to the fault of the developers, who have built what amounts to the easiest and most brilliant updating system on the market – free or otherwise).  To suggest that putting software maintenance into the hands of normal computer users (our moms are on Facebook) would better protect our data would be misleading at best.

It’s the Internet, Stupid.

One of the overlooked arguments that have been getting increasing traction in recent weeks is quite simply that privacy shouldn’t be a concern, because you should use social networking responsibly and not post compromising materials to the public cloud.

“But Facebook isn’t public,” they’ll say.  ”It’s my data.”

I’ve got some news for you.  Facebook is whatever it wants to be, and unless you haven’t been paying attention to the trend (which you have, or you wouldn’t be aware it was even an issue), they’re taking your data public, one kilobyte at a time.

The Internet is a very public place.  And even when you think you’ve got your privacy settings all figured out, somebody will change the terms of service.  Or a server will get hacked.  Or some multinational corporation will buy the data.  If you don’t want your social interactions known, stop putting them in the public sphere.

Ummm… I thought you were going to tell us about the next Facebook?

Oh, right.  So here’s the long and short of it.  There is, at the time of this writing, no true contender to speak of.  Nobody that is yet clever enough to slay the mighty privacy-eating dragon.  That being said, there are a number of projects out there that are gearing up to try.

appleseed

Appleseed was started in 2004.  That was probably before you had ever heard the word Facebook.  Fast forward 6 years, and you’ve probably still never heard the word Appleseed.  One of the earliest attempts at creating an open social network serves as a prime example that even though there is an ever-growing army of people working to tear the walls down around whatever social networking app people happen to be using at any given time, there is little evidence that any open alternatives have made so much as a dent in the armor of the status quo.  Appleseed is still in beta (version 0.7.3 at the time of this writing), is open source, and uses a distributed model that is self-hosted.

DiSo

Here’s one more for the history books.  DiSo’s strategy was to attach itself to a platform that was already popular.  Their main contribution was a WordPress plugin that would use the already established user-base of the WordPress community to serve as a launchpad for their distributed network.  All of this would have been fine had the WordPress community signed up in droves.  They didn’t.

one social web

A sort of hybrid between aggregation and stand-alone distributed networking as far as we can tell.  This is the first of two items in the list that haven’t been released yet (i.e. we can’t declare them dead on arrival).  There’s talk that they’ll be launching their own social network this summer and allowing willing networks to plug in to their system so data can be shared across the board.  This sounds great and all, but without Mark Zuckerberg getting in line to rework Facebook for compliance, we don’t see anyone taking too much notice.

diaspora*

The present antithesis to Facebook is almost certainly marching to the beat of Diaspora’s drumbeat.  A group of four college kids asked people to pledge $10,000 so they could build a distributed networking software this summer.  They closed the doors to further donations after collecting just a hair over $200,000.  Let the coding begin.  Here’s a feature list from TechCrunch:

By September 2010, the team says it will release the first iteration of the project, fully open-sourced under the AGPL. Here’s the feature they say we’ll see:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• End to end GPG
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

As far as I can tell we’ve managed to show that there is reasonable discontent with Facebook’s features, but hardly enough enthusiasm to make so much as a dent in the growth of the world’s most popular networking site.  While there are some newcomers on the horizon, it’s plain to see that similar feature sets in the past haven’t inspired revolt.  Unless there is a word of mouth campaign that is exponentially greater than the one used to unseat Myspace as the leader of the pack a couple of years ago, we’re likely going to continue talking about replacements, as opposed to actually replacing anything, for some time to come.

“The Ford Road Landfill Site is a 15-acre inactive facility located on the Black River in Elyria, Ohio. The landfill was originally a ravine which has been filled to the same level as Ford Road. There are approximately 2500 people living within a 1-mile radius of the Site.

The landfill accepted municipal and various industrial wastes in drums and in bulk including, but not limited to, the following wastes: 700 tons of hazardous materials including heavy metals, other inorganic substances, and miscellaneous catalysts and insecticides from Harshaw Chemicals, a division of Gulf Oil Chemical Company; 3.3 million pounds of chemical wastes including organics, solvents, resins, oils and sludges, elastomers, acrylates, and latex emulsions from B.F. Goodrich Company’s Chemical Group; and 32,000 gallons of sludge per day from 1963 to 1970 from General Motors. Some of the wastes were burned on the Site.”

That being said, the site is extremely simple. There are some links to the Ford Road specific pages on the EPA website, some articles and things like that in the resources section, and a wonderful little javascript timeline that serves to put things in perspective as far as the responsible parties, the sheer quantities of their toxic disposal in the area, as well as the incredibly slow movement on a cleanup process that has now stretched the better part of three decades.

Enjoy.