The Facebook Uprising

Bring Your Pitchforks on June 6

I'm really tired. I'm not sure why exactly, but I'm tired and I have a lot to do this week so I'm going to have to shorten this post a bit if I want to get it out at all. So I'm going to focus in on just a few really big stories and briefly highlight a few others. I've cut quite a few stories I would've talked about if I had more time, but oh well.

Clearly, the biggest story last week was Facebook. I have to admit that I'm surprised at the reaction the tech media has had to Facebook's recent changes with turning your profile information into links to pages that expose you and other privacy changes Facebook has made recently. We let this happen gradually over time by not reacting enough to Facebook's previous changes, and now that they've really jumped the shark it looks like people are finally ready to step up and say something. I expected a reaction similar to previous changes, but it looks like we're getting really passionate posts from blogs and respected news publications every other day crying out against the changes, some of which are nicely summarized in this picture. It's a bit misleading, but it's not really exaggerating things when you boil down the facts. It's not likely going into great details about those points make the situation better.

The Huffington Report reported on a group of individuals who have decided to send as clear a message as possible to Facebook: an organized boycott of Facebook. They're planning to all delete their accounts on May 31 and are encouraging everyone to do the same. Of course, even after you delete your account Facebook will still have access to your data, but it may put a heavy enough dent in their numbers to wake them up and realize that this isn't like when people got a little annoyed by Facebook's past indiscretions. It's going to be hard to get everyone to quit Facebook though (myself included) so I'm actually in support of their second idea: don't use Facebook at all on June 6. It'll probably be much easier to convince people to do that. It may not be as powerful, but it may actually hurt Facebook's wallet.

After reading this interview with an anonymous Facebook employee, you may not find their movement so extreme. Like many startups, it looks like Facebook began without much long-term vision. It was all about getting a product to market, which is reasonable except that it ended up breeding a culture where privacy isn't a top priority. Half of the interview sounds nuts, but then the other half sounds more reasonable. A group of NYU students are actually trying to build their own Facebook called Disapora that actually respects privacy. Sadly, there's no word on when it'll actually be out whereas now is exactly the best time for them to ship and capitalize on Facebook's bad press. It's an interesting concept, but you've got to wonder if they can really stick to their morals in the face of investors wanting them to satiate advertisers, if it ever takes off. These guys seem smart though so I hope it works out.

The Flash Dilemma

I wonder if Apple predicted that the controversy regarding their disapproval of Flash on the iPhone/iPad would go on for this long? In a ZDNet article that almost seems to have been swept under the rug in everyone's mind since it was posted, it was revealed that a Flash demo on a Nexus One crashed twice. Granted, the rule of thumb for demos is that things will never go exactly as you plan, but you have to admit that, even in that philosophy, two crashes looks pretty bad. It's worth noting that he was using an outdated version ofFlash in the demo, but it's not like the build was months old or something.

Some people have noticed a technology called "Gianduia" popping up in random places that looks to be Apple's competitor to Flash. The reading I did on it was kind of boring and went over even my head, but if Apple were to make that an externally facing technology then I hope people would be a little insulted by the hypocrisy given their repeated argument that Adobe Flash is flying in the face of open web standards.

Part of why this story dragged on another week is that Gawker's Ryan Tate engaged in an e-mail exchange directly with Steve Jobs regarding Flash and porn on the iPhone and Steve's responses were well crafted and interesting. I don't buy his we-want-to-do-the-right-thing argument one bit, but I do believe that they just want to promote the user experience their envision. Whether you agree with that or not is for you to vote for with your dollars - there's no need to whine about it. There's nothing wrong with being willfully ignorant of what Apple's doing if you're happy with their products. They're not torturing anybody, they're just conducting business.

Let me cram in two more quick Apple stories. In the saga over the "stolen" next-generation iPhone, it has been revealed that Steve Jobs contacted Gizmodo directly to get a response that was an e-mail almost in the realm of extortion. They wrote it in a very clever way, but if you read between the lines you may come to my conclusion that Gizmodo was being sleazy. Lastly, Mac Rumors noticed that the new iPad ads are almost a sequel to the ad campaign for the hapless Apple Newton. I'm sure Apple is hoping for very different results this time.

Android Outsells the iPhone

I wish this was the biggest story of last week because it's such a cool one. Google Android, when you look at all the phones running the operating system, outsold the iPhone last quarter for the first time. Some analysts believe it's due in large part to Verizon's buy-one-get-one-free promotion, but I think it's more than just that. Android phones are just finally cool and the iPhone hasn't been new in a while.

If you're really excited about Android though, you should check out Froyo (Android 2.2), or at least AndroidPolice's impressions from trying it out on the Nexus One. It turns out to be quite a bit more performant.

Speaking of the Nexus One though: Google will no longer be selling it directly and will instead work with partners to actually sell it in stores. It may be too late for this to turn the phone into a financial success, but it's their only hope of salvaging the situation. The phone received much critical acclaim despite, unsurprisingly, not getting a lot of sales (since you can't play with it in a store).

The Rest

I'm going to go through these even faster then normal.

Steam (probably the best service for downloading and managing quality games) is now available for Macs and Valve is giving away Portal for free. Act now because that game is ridiculously fun for all ages.

Billshrink has a great infographic on wireless dissatisfaction in America and pricing comparisons.

Sprint will start selling the HTC Evo 4G, the first 4G phone ever, on June 4 for $199 (subsidized). That's a pretty standard price for a new high-end smartphone, but Sprint is obviously a small player so we'll see how the release goes.

If you have Windows 7 then you really need to check out this article on how to speed it up. It's already fairly fast for me and some of these tips make it even better.

YouTube finally fixed how private videos work to make more sense.

The FCC is allowing the MPAA to activate set top box controls to deactivate pieces of your home theater system if they think you're breaking the law. Definitely scar stuff.

Ars Technica has a great article on the government plan to bring 4 Mbps Internet to the whole country. It's a very steep bill for taxpayers.

Iron Man 2

Let the Summer Blockbuster Season Begin

Since I saw Iron Man 2 on Friday I figure I might as well share my thoughts before we get into the normal stuff.

The original Iron Man is without equivocation considered one of the best comic book superhero movies ever by any comic book geek. Definitely top 5 if not top 3. Given that Iron Man was never a blockbuster franchise like Batman or Superman, I thought it was definitely special what Jon Favreau was able to accomplish with Robert Downey, Jr. and the Iron Man universe. It was a better origin story than Batman Begins in terms of pacing and probably a few other things and just a fun all-around summer movie. That's really huge shoes for a sequel to fill. Did it get it right? That's hard to say, to be honest. I think when people's expectations are high like they were for this movie you've gotta be perfect to really blow them away, and this movie didn't do that. Nonetheless, I thought it was a more than acceptable sequel and definitely well worth seeing.

Plot-wise, this movie takes over literally right where the first one left off and shows how the ending (which I don't want to spoil) gave rise to physicist Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) as a villain using Stark's own arc reactor technology. Meanwhile, Tony Stark is dealing with the adverse health effects of the arc reactor in his chest while being watched closely by Nick Fury (Sam Jackson). I don't want to spoil anything by revealing any more than that, but suffice to say it's an interesting, though comic book far-fetched, storyline that diverts somewhat from the Iron Man comic book storyline to tell its own story. I thought it was actually a pretty well-written story. You have to really forgive the hand-waving with regard to the technological expertise of some of the main characters, but I personally watch 24 and am already well-seasoned in that.

I thought the acting was superb across the board. Robert Downing, Jr was possibly even better in this movie, Scarlett Johansson was the perfect casting for Black Widow (so glad that they didn't go with Emily Blunt), and Gwenyth Paltrow was still as sexy and sophisticated as ever. Johansson's role was a pretty decent female empowerment character (sans a couple of her outfits) and I was glad to see that they didn't really overdo it. I think some hardcore fans will be a little disappointed with her portrayal, but I thought it worked in the context of the movie. I think the re-casting of Rhodes was noticeably weird. I think Don Cheadle would've been fine if he was in the original as well, but whenever I saw him I just kept picturing Terrence Howard. I was happy overall with Mickey Rourke, he did his hokey Russian accent well.

The problem is that Iron Man 2 didn't bring to the table what Iron Man did because it didn't break the formula of superhero movies like that one did. It felt more like a continuation of the previous movie instead of something totally new. So less like The Dark Knight, which was a huge breath of fresh air, and more like X-men 2. The action scenes were great and the movie was so much fun to watch - especially the well-timed humor. However, it felt like a comic book movie. There's nothing wrong with that, it just means that it can't be extraordinary. I still give it an A- and strongly recommend seeing it yourself while it's on the big screen. Just don't bolt after the credits - they snuck in an extra scene like in the first one. It's not life-changing or anything, but it's something that will give you goosebumps if you're a comic book geek.

Kin Available this week

I know you've been waiting with bated breath so here it is: the new Kin will be available in Verizon stores on May 13 and is already available online. The creatively named Kin One and Kin Two are priced at $50 and $100, respectively, but apparently will have interesting data plan like the Sidekick.

However, Pre Central aggregated some of the reviews and they don't seem to be very positive. It seems like the phone was pretty half-baked overall and an uneven experience. The ideas from the original presentation that I originally raved about were apparently poorly executed. It looks like Kin Studio, the online timeline of your phone, is pretty decent, but the Kin Spot and a number of other features are disastrous user experiences. Despite the pricing being good, I'd be surprised if these flew off the shelves and insulted if people chose them over the Palm Pre or Palm Pixi, which are usually easy to find at those price points and have a lot more features, like pretty good call quality.

Treasury Site and Google Chat Hacks

There were a few security breaches last week, the most flagrant of which I felt was the U.S. Treasury websites being compromised and giving malware to its visitors. Well, technically they redirected to a Ukrainian site that gave out the malware, but what an embarrassment to that IT department that these guys injected HTML code. I'm guessing it was some sort of XSS variant, but they're being hush on the details. They already look bad - hiding the truth from the people who pay these idiots' salaries isn't going to make them look any better.

I thought I'd throw in this AP story about a vulnerability in how your web site requests are routed that could be disastrous if exploited. The bottom line is that TCP/IP, the protocol that the Internet operates on, was not built with security in mind because it was not designed for massive public use. I think this is something the U.S. government should step into to motivate a fix. The private companies apparently don't have a strong interest in fixing things but an attack on how Internet packets are routed could be really bad for our infrastructure.

Techcrunch was tipped off on a pretty big vulnerability last week regarding Facebook. It turns out that in where in your Privacy Settings you can see how other people view your profile, you can also see who they're chatting with. Rather than applying their restriction to how you view your profile, they basically gave you a window into their Facebook, more or less. You could even mess with their friend requests. Who knows how many people have exploited this without reporting it. It really calls into question Facebook's quality assurance principles. It's fixed now, but disturbing that it was out there for an indeterminate amount of time.

Facebook Under Fire

Riding off the coattails of that story, let's talk about the rabble growing against Facebook. It used to be that Facebook's changes were an annoyance that people just got used to. Now though, multiple people are being very vocal about their problems with Facebook and these editorials are getting a lot of eyeballs.

One blogger gave his ten reasons why you should quit Facebook while Wired calls for an open alternative where things make sense instead of following the whims of Facebook. This was mostly prompted by how Facebook is now sharing a lot of information about you to developers taking advantage of its new APIs and how the fact that Facebook encourages you to turn your text in your profile to "Pages" means that you're exposed through these "Pages" as being a fan of that thing to the world. Of course, there have been plenty of offenses leading up to this (how you can never really remove yourself, how your information is being passed along to third-party application developers, etc.), but ultimately their misleading policies have really become cause for some concern.

If you're stubborn like me and are hesitant to quit Facebook cold turkey, at least consider abating the amount of information you feed to it.

Final Notes

Ok, I'm running way behind on what I wanted to get done tonight because of a nap I took earlier. I'm going to have to cut out sooner on this post than originally planned. Here's what else I had for you:

Apple is now in the middle of an antitrust suit for anti-competitive practices. It's not clear if this is because of their ban on Flash or their patent lawsuits against HTC, but it'll be interested to see what happens. Some of their practices are unconscionable, but I'm not sure that they're illegal.

The FCC is still pushing forward on net neutrality trying to find a way around the court decision ruling that they can't regulate the ISPs.

The U.S. ranks 30th in the world in Internet speed. Even Andorra is beating us. Ouch.

Netflix is moving more of its computational power into Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Smart move. Much more efficient than buying and maintaining your own hardware for solving those big problems.

This is a pretty eye-opening breakdown of the cell phone providers in America by customer satisfaction and dropped calls.

Check out all the new features coming in the forthcoming Kindle firmware upgrade including password protection and better sharing capabilities.

It looks like Amazon has one of the biggest databases in the world, and it's pretty exciting that I help process some of that data every day. Anyway, check out who has the other enormous databases.

If you want to know what's on TV the Interweb, check out Clicker.

If you're on Windows and didn't know about Microsoft's Fix It tool, then go check it out now.

Last but not least, Google made a really awesome video advertising how fast Chrome is compared to things like sound and a potato gun. It's a lot of fun to watch.

Android vs. the World (of Cellphones)

Sorry that this post is kind of late, but when I'm on vacation I pretty much let out my inner laziness, which is what I ordinarily fight on a daily basis to get things done. There is a lot to talk about from the past couple of weeks though so let's get down to it.

Nexus One

The rumors of a Googlephone is probably as old as the initial rumors of an iPhone, but they have finally come to fruition. It started out as a confirmed report of Google "dogfooding" a mobile device, and then Engadget got pictures of it:



It looks to be running Android 2.1 (which includes Google Navigation for free turn-by-turn directions) and looks like it's running on T-Mobile but supports WiFi from the pictures Engadget has. Other than that, all we know is that it has a trackball and is called the Nexus One. Speculation tells us that Google will sell it unlocked, which traditionally haven't done very well because people don't want to spend $400-$600 on a cell phone anymore and the people at the wireless carriers' stores are going to sell the subsidized phones harder. I don't think this phone is really much to get excited about, to be honest. Making a cell phone is not easy if you haven't done one before. Apple had plenty of hardware experience before the iPhone and spent years working on it. I still think the Nexus One is going to be intended more as a developer Phone than a consumer device.

Why do we need a developer phone on Android? Because Android is facing the same problem as WinMo: too many devices. Developing web applications is already a nightmare for small web dev shops because now you have to design websites supported by IE8, IE7, IE6, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, in addition to mobile devices. Even here though you can push out patches and updates with ease, whereas with mobile applications you're relying on users picking up your update if you make a change that doesn't look right on a particular flavor of Android on a specific piece of hardware. The more Android phones there are, the more configurations big mobile application teams have to keep in stock for testing, which ultimately just makes it less appealing. I think this is unavoidable in a market where you're trying to get on multiple carriers to compete with Apple and RIM and I personally thing there should be a different app store for different Android versions and configurations where it's up to the developers to mark their application as guaranteed to work on certain configurations so that they can limit their quality assurance as needed and provide a better experience overall.

It's too early to tell if this is, in fact, a problem (at least I think it is), but so far Android isn't doing all that hot on market share. It's funny how a lot of my friends downplay webOS and think Android is the future, and yet it's still behind in market share to RIM, Apple, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian (Nokia). To be fair, of course, Nokia, RIM, WinMo, and Palm (via Palm OS) have had cell phones years before Apple or Android, but the original iPhone came out little over a year before the first Android phone and we've had Android phones on multiple carriers for over a year now. While it's clear that RIM and Apple have had stellar growth in recent months with Microsoft taking a tumble, and the US has never been a big market for Symbian, Palm and Android have a more uncertain future. I'm rooting for webOS and Android, but I think Palm's brand recognition/loyalty from consumers gives them a leg up. Hopefully, we can also crack down on ridiculous contract cancellation fees so that people get the chance to try out more phones and find the one that right for them.

Harry Potter and the Mythical Bandwidth Hogs

This has nothing to do with Harry Potter except that I finally popped in my Prisoner of Azkaban Blu-ray last night for the first time so it's still on my mind a bit.

Anyway, one of the arguments for bandwidth caps from the very beginning of the hub-bub about bandwidth caps (how much data you're allowed to consume on your Internet connection before you're cut off) is that there are people out there hogging the bandwidth so it'd be a lot more fair to everyone else to cap that. It turns out that this may not be quite true though. We don't have any proof that the networks aren't already configured to handle these so-called hogs such that other subscribers don't have their usage impacted. In all likelihood, the ISPs are drumming up this nonsense to convince people to fork over more money to them at an amount that's far from commensurate with the expense of the extra bandwidth.

One analyst offered to look at their usage statistics pro bono to prove/disprove the myth of the bandwidth hogs if he's allowed to publish his results, but I doubt that any ISP has responded to that. Maybe we should write in to Mythbusters and see if they have better luck.

The Apple Gestapo

It's fitting that I cover a story about the Apple Gestapo having seen a guy portraying a Gestapo officer get stabbed in the neck last night in Inglourious Basterds (vacation is the perfect time to to break out your new Blu-rays).

Many of us have heard a lot of stories about the culture at Apple and the management style of Steve Jobs, but not everyone knows how Apple has gotten so good at keeping secrets. It turns out that when a leak is suspected in a certain office, a special forces team is sent in for a lockdown operation. People's phones and computers are searched for evidence that they leaked something. In the case that they have, I'm guessing that a lawsuit is in order shortly after prompt termination (from their employment, that is).

It just shows the more extreme side of Apple and the privacy that employees have to give up to work there. Can you imagine some random guy finding drunk texts to friends on phones, or pictures of your wife in a bikini from your recent vacation? It's funny how at Amazon we just sign an NDA and we're trusted to not reveal company secrets - what a concept. Lo and behold, people generally stick to that. I haven't heard of any such gestapo in Redmond either over at Microsoft.

Apple Acquires Lala

In light of that fun-filled article, it's probably not the best news that Apple has acquired Lala. If Apple doesn't care about its own employees then it's scary to think about what they'll do to an acquisition that defies the iTunes business model. Lala allows you to back up your entire music library on their site for streaming through your web browser, and you can also buy tracks from them. Just a dime to stream a specific song forever or another 70-89 cents to be able to download them. They may leverage Lala to let people stream their entire music collections from where ever through Lala, although it uses Flash so it won't yet work on the iPhone. More people are speculating that they'll gut the company for talent and dismantle the service itself. Given that Lala hasn't proven profitable, that wouldn't be surprising. Still, I use Lala on an almost daily basis so I'd be very disappointed if it went away, to the point that I'd be willing to pay an annual or maybe a monthly fee just to use it to stream my existing music collection.

Twitter Gets Hacked

Late last week, the Twitter website was replaced by some text from the "Iranian Cyber Army" for what I believe was an hour or two. Twitter hasn't had the best track record when it comes to general security and this definitely doesn't help their case.

Back during Iran's elections, the US government intervened to keep Twitter available to Iranians to voice their opinions as well as join the world conversation on the elections (at least as best they can on Twitter) and it looks like this group of hackers was not too pleased by this. What they did here was definitely pretty childish and didn't do much other than to show that they can outsmart the ragtag security of the Twitter website. Well, I guess they also got press coverage from it. I'll give them credit for corrupting the DNS tables for twitter.com to point to their site instead, which isn't the easiest thing in the world, but attacking Twitter doesn't really solve anything. Saying that the availability of Twitter was an interference in their election is like saying that Livejournal being available is an interference because then people can blog their thoughts on the election. It shows a deep lack of understanding of technology and an untargeted take-action mentality that's as stupid as it can be dangerous.

Facebook's Privacy Settings Change

This was a pretty big deal recently: Facebook forced all Facebook users to audit their privacy settings upon logging in to which the defaults were set to everyone or friends of friends. Even I have to admit, this is pretty smarmy. They did this knowing that a lot of people will hit 'Ok' without paying attention and assuming that the defaults are whatever they had set them to. Not only did they do this, but they removed the finer grain control you had over privacy of certain pieces of your Profile. If I was on the team that carried this out I probably would've quit, to be honest. It's unethical. I'm not one of these guys who's really high and might about privacy, but this is clearly not in the best interest of your users and only serves to advance the interests of Facebook.

Facebook and Google have both taken an increasingly privacy-agnostic view of the world, with Facebook being a far worse offender. My personal opinion of why is that the more information they can make publicly available the more they have the index, which means the more time you'll spend time on their sites. This means they'll have more content to target ads around and more page views for eyeballs on ads. No one would admit this if it were true, but I don't see any other good reason for trying to actively take people's privacy away. I'm one of these people who doesn't post super private stuff online because I know that the Internet is inherently insecure and only trust a few very specific sites, which does not include Facebook, so I don't personally find this to be a big deal but I understand the big picture of why it is.

I'll give Facebook one thing though, Mark Zuckerberg's profile and pictures are largely available for anyone to see and he claims this was on purpose. At least they're not being wholly hypocritical, just deceptive.

Quickies

Alright, it's time to wrap up. Here's what I didn't have time to talk about more:

Google acquired DocVerse, which allows users to collaborate over Microsoft Office documents. Looks like they're trying to take on Office 2010's online services head-on, but I am skeptical that they'll succeed.

Google also launched Google Goggles, a visual search application for Android. It looks cool, but computer vision has only come so far that I imagine it's not super accurate. Still, it's pretty cool.

Congress is coming down on a huge Internet scam that many online retailers are complicit in: post-transaction deals that end up scamming you out of a lot of money. You should check out what retailers are doing this and boycott them, but I'm proud to say that Amazon is not one of them.

This is a hilarious graphic on how different OS users see other operating systems.

If you're looking for inspiration on transforming your office, this is a really fun look at some of the best ones of the year.

Google launched Vevo, a YouTube spinoff for music videos. I had a lot of technical issues with it at launch so I haven't played with it much, but it's linked to from any legal music videos on YouTube.

Java 7 is slated to be available next year and it has several cool features to boot including first-class language support for collections and automatic resource management as the most impressive improvements. I cannot wait to get my hands on it.

If you have Chrome or IE envy in your Firefox browser, this is a pretty impressive list of add-ons to simulate the high points of competing browers.

I laughed so much while reading this list of hilarious WiFi SSIDs that I couldn't help but plug it. Some of them are really quite creative.

Have a Merry Christmas everyone! I'll try to get something else up before the new year!

Facebook Cons

The Latest Facebook Scandal

What is it about Facebook that gives it such a celebrity status among tech journalists? It seems to get a lot of coverage despite at its core merely being a platform to communicate with friends and post embarrassing pictures of your friends. The problem with being in the spotlight is that you get at least as much negative press as positive press (unless you agree with the adage that any press is good press). Typically, Facebook is bitten by UI changes or some critical privacy discrepancy at least once every 6 months. This time, the big news is a bit off the beaten path.

Techcrunch was probably first to the scene here with an expose from an insider who used to be a part of spreading spam on Facebook. It turns out that there's a whole seedy underbelly to the world of Facebook Applications. Facebook users typically aren't fans of buying stuff on Facebook, but it turns out that they are gullible enough to do things like download toolbars or give up personal information when prodded with the right incentive, which leads to conning them into paying the shady company money. Computerworld has a blogwatch compiling quotes from other articles weighing in on the scams calling out Farmville and Mafia Wars and decrying the offenses of virtual currency and hidden ponzi schemes.

So what happened? I guess this was really inevitable. You have a network that's growing like crazy, has an open platform, and users seem to put a lot of misplaced trust in. Facebook is a believer in small government and so they have tried to be hands off, which is an even better situation for scammers looking to make a quick buck. Now they're locked in an arms race as advertisers are finding more creative ways to cheat the system. It's not a very hopeful situation right now, but it's possible that legitimate advertisers will become more prevalent on Facebook and edge out the shady ones. In my opinion, Facebook still needs to make a more active effort to police these shady application owners. I hesitate to recommend a vetting process because we don't want another iTunes App Store situation, which is irritating despite being successful, but Amazon and eBay and many other sites have whole teams that work to expose fraud, why can't Facebook? If they already do have such a team then they may need to make it bigger because this is going to hurt the long-term growth potential of Facebook (the little they have, in my opinion) if people trust Facebook less and less.

Google Feature Bonanza

Last week really demonstrated how big Google has become as they managed to release 3 new features/products.

The smallest additions were options to allow more text to show up in your search results and/or thumbnails from the pages in the results. Some people went so far as to create Firefox extension to simulate this functionality so there was clearly a demand for them, though I've never felt the need for either feature.

Arguably the biggest thing to come from Google was Google Dashboard, which brings together all the data attached to your Google account into an easy-to-use interface. It is kind of cool, but I don't think it's especially useful and is creepy in a way. While it does force you to login again before using it, like when you try searching your history, it tells you stuff like how many calls you've made in Google Voice and the last video you favorited in YouTube. It's more a frightening reminder of everything Google knows about you than a great utility. However, the fact that it does give you this view of what Google has on you may encourage you to clamp down on areas you're more sensitive about.

The last thing Google announced was Commerce Search, which is a cloud-hosted search appliance targeted at retail websites. While it's not a bad idea I definitely question their ability to turn it into a successful product given that people barely remember that Google Checkout exists nowadays.

Selling Software With One Hand, Laying Off With the Other

Microsoft has sold a few copies of Windows 7 since it's launch a couple of weeks ago to the tune of 234% more copies in its opening week than Vista's opening week, and 84% more revenue. Despite the strong sales of Snow Leopard it's clear that Windows 7 came out on top as it already has more market share than Snow Leopard or all distributions of Linux combined. Granted, that's only 2% of the market but the other 89% of the market is Vista and XP. Still, not too shabby for its first two weeks.

Unfortunately, it's not all good news in Redmond: Microsoft announced that they would conclude the layoffs they began at the beginning of the year with 800 more layoffs. I'm guessing that some of these laid off employees can transfer to other teams within the company, so it may not be as bad as it sounds, but I'm sure that more than a few will have to look for work elsewhere.

Maybe they can find work at a much-criticized Microsoft retail store. The first one has opened in Scottsdale, AZ, which somewhat makes sense since there's not much to do in Scottsdale but shop. It doesn't look much better or worse than it has in the leaked documents but who knows, it could be a runaway success.

It's All About Android

Even though the iPhone still rules the smartphone roost (at least in America), Android 2.0 has turned more than a few heads. It turns out that it has more cool features than just Google Navigation, and Tech Radar has a pretty concise rundown of what's new. Some of the highlights are contact sync with external services, Microsoft Exchange support (took long enough), multiplayer gaming via Blueooth, and a much enhanced camera application. If you want a more in-depth look, Gizmodo has a pretty well-written review but be forewarned that they sneak in feedback of Droid in there since it's the only device you can get your grubby hands on running Android 2.0 so who knows if the sluggishness would be better on a better processor. What I'm disappointed in is that only certain devices can get this upgrade. I can understand if there are hardware limitations, but some of these features shouldn't be so tightly coupled with the hardware. It creates a world like Windows Mobile where you have different versions floating around where someones experience with an older version makes them think that the newest version is just as bad because they don't understand they're different. Or maybe Android users are savvy enough to understand this (no disrespect to Android users, but it's not likely that they all realize this).

Meanwhile, Verizon launched the HTC Droid Eris last Friday, which will actually run Android 1.5.



I think it's a pretty nice-looking phone, but it's really just a reworked version of the HTC Hero made compatible with the Verizon network. I understand that they want this phone out there to fill out their line some more for the holiday season, but, as I cited above, it's going to cause customer confusion having two different Android phones running two different versions of Android that are both brand new to the Verizon network. They ideally should've released Droid Eris earlier or delayed it until Android 2.0 was ready for it.

Quickies

Just a few brief stories left...

Apparently there's a new format already in the works to follow HD called UHD, or Universal HD. A resolution of 3840 x 2160 sounds downright crazy, but I'm sure in the year 2023 I'll be eating my words when we all have a UHD set.

For those of you living in the present, Sound and Vision Magazine has a pretty cool guide to LED.

Joel Spolsky put up a blog post I liked that starts out explaining warning signs that you should quit your job and ends selling a product I'd endorse if it does what he says called Stack Overflow Careers. It's basically a simplified LinkedIn for getting your resume out there. It's not a bad idea.

The forthcoming version of uTorrent stops competing with ISPs' packet shaping strategies and cooperates with ISPs to adjust download and upload speeds for clients according to network congestion. Apparently, this will affect upload speed more than download speeds and is supposed to end up resulting in faster downloads overall. Very cool stuff.

In the October browser market share statistics, Firefox has finally bested Internet Explorer 6, which has more market share than IE7 or IE7 so technically Firefox as a whole has more users than any single version of IE.

Have a great, illness-free week everyone! *cough* Time for some TheraFlu...

Net Neutrality Heats Up

Net Neutrality in the News

Net neutrality was in the news quite a bit last week. If you don't know what that is, you can use my short documentary from last year as a primer. It's been in the news off and on in the past 4 years or so but there were quite a few articles last week regarding some rules that the FCC is proposing to preserve net neutrality. Interestingly enough, the EFF is pretty pessimistic about these proposals as giving the FCC power that it doesn't actually have. The so-called Four Freedoms that the FCC is trying to support are venerable ideals: that consumers are entitled to access to legal Internet content, to run applications and services of their choice, to connect to the Internet on their choice of lawful devices that don't harm the network, and competition among content providers as well as service providers. They're simple but elegant principles to stand behind and I'm definitely glad that the FCC is at least not going the other direction and favoring Comcast et al. Even if they don't have the power to foster net neutrality I hope that in investigating their authority the issue gets enough visibility to become something that ISPs don't sweep under the rug before people wake up and figure out what a problem it is when content providers don't get a fair shake at distributing their content.

It's a common misconception that net neutrality means that consumers are entitled to pay a flat rate for unlimited Internet usage as well, but that's actually not the case. It's not as big of a deal to created tiered packages for Internet access as long as each tier has access to the exact same Internet as any other tier. This is what AT&T and Time Warner want to bring about - pay as you go Internet. Charging by the bit for your Internet consumption. This isn't so crazy considering that your water, electricity, and cell phone usage are metered, but in a country that has a long way to go in improving broadband penetration and where the Internet has become so vital to some people's lifestyles it can definitely be detrimental to everyone to have crappy tiers, and that's what I'm worried about. The world that Time Warner envisions where most people are using very little Internet and they want to charge more money to the Internet hogs isn't the future that's ahead of us anymore with things like Hulu and Netflix and YouTube growing in subscribers and content every day. If you have to pay by the bit you may be less likely to stream that movie on Netflix, and I think the Internet could see somewhat of a dip in profitability with less eyeballs. I can understand the ISPs' argument that Internet plans with unlimited access are unsustainable in the long-term, but they still need to work on upgrading their networks and coming up with affordable pricing plans, unlike the ones proposed in Texas not too long ago by Comcast that they had to pull out of because they were so unreasonable. 150 GB is definitely too small of a cap when you consider a family of four using the Internet, especially if one of the parents have a job that involves using a VPN and/or a VNC viewer when working from home.

It's good to see these issues getting slightly more exposure and I hope that we reach an agreement on a future for the Internet that makes sense for companies and for consumers.

Search Deals

There were a few high-profile search deals struck last week. The first one was Bing acquiring non-exclusive rights to search Facebook and Twitter for their real-time status updates. For a few hours, Bing had something that Google didn't. It wasn't even a day though before Google announced a similar deal with Twitter, but they had not struck one with Facebook. Given that Twitter has more public updates than Facebook, it was the bigger deal anyhow. As a cherry on top, Google whispered to the API that they plan on adding music pages to search this week with direct links to download songs and rich content for artists with images, lyrics, song previews, and other goodies. This is akin to the artist pages you find on Amazon when you search for big artists.

The real story on this is between the lines: we have actual competition in search again. Hooray! We have two giants pitted against each other to deliver better sites that ultimately benefit consumers. I'm fairly certain that Yahoo still has a bigger share of the market than Bing, but I don't think that their terrible advertising campaign is making many inroads compared to the good fortune that Bing has had in recent months with drumming up traffic (probably thanks in part to their controversial ad that involved vomiting).

Blur, Droid and a Watch

There were 3 mobile phone stories last week, but none of them were really that big.

Boy Genius posted pictures of Motorola Calgary, which is the codename for the Motorola Blur-branded handset that's coming to Verizon. It looks like a plasticky, low-end smartphone, which isn't a bad thing but that's just what the design tells me. If it's not intended to be that then they need a better design team at Motorola (that's not really news though).

You've probably seen the stupid Droid ads now, so does that mean Calgary is "Droid"? In a manner of speaking, I believe so. It turns out that Droid is not a single phone but a series of Android phones coming to Verizon. Lame. They're re-branding Android as "Droid"? That doesn't make any sense to me. Engadget believe that the Motorola Sholes and HTC Eris are the first of the line and the Sholes may, in fact, end up being called just "Droid". I imagine that we'll hear more from Verizon about this later in the week as the ads now indicate a release of something in November.

Lastly, how stupid does this thing look?



It's a Bluetooth-enabled watch for your Blackberry. They had a bad quarter but decided to sustain development of a dumb-looking watch so you can be even more connected to your Blackberry? How about making a phone that innovates instead of these handsets they put out that are just marginally better than the previous model? Besides me, who uses a wristwatch anymore anyway? I love wearing a watch because I never know what time it is and like quick access to it, especially during meetings where there's no wall clock, but I recognize that most people don't think they need one.

Amazon Tidbits

Amazon had a really great Q3 and posted a 29% increase in sales compared to Q3 2008. There was definitely a lot of hard work behind it and relentless customer obsession, I hope our good fortune and blessings continue.

There were a couple of other recent announcements that I thought were cool. Last week, Amazon announced a free PC application for Kindle owners to read their books on their PC for free and even includes touchscreen functionality for Windows 7 users with multitouch devices. The other thing was same-day delivery in seven major cities, which is just $6 for Prime users on any order. Also, Prime users formerly didn't get Saturday delivery without paying extra but can now get Saturday delivery on orders placed before cutoff on Thursday. If I'm not mistaken, this is the first year ever that Amazon is offering shipping options so that you can order a last-minute gift on Christmas morning and have it at your doorstep in time for dinner.

The Short Stuff

Alright, time to wrap up with some quick stories.

Windows 7 launched last Thursday and hardware manufacturers are hoping to benefit from the release with a sales boost this holiday season.

If you're not sold on Windows 7 yet, I've talked plenty about it already so I'll direct you to Ars Technica's rather thorough review.

If you plan to upgrade to Windows 7 but are worried about re-installing your core base of applications, then you have to check out Ninite. It's a really cool program that allows you to create a single installer based around a list of applications you can choose from. It features a lot of apps that I love.

Gizmodo has a slew of images and a video of the Nook, which is the terrible name Barnes and Noble has decided on for their e-Reader, and you can find even more pictures at Engadget. The price point is $256, I wonder where they got that from.

Inglourious Basterds (see my review) was finally given an official DVD and Blu-ray release date last week of December 15, which is a few days after the UK release. It's available on Amazon for pre-order now! I already ordered my copy and can't wait for the extended scenes and the full version of Nation's Pride.

AMD announced the first triple-core processors defying the longstanding tradition in computing of sticking to powers of two.

Lastly, if you're looking for Google Chrome extensions to install then check this out.

Have a great week!

Office 2010 Goes Online

Office 2010 Technical Preview

I don't know what was going on last week that there was so little news, but the most interesting thing to come out was truly that they new Office is now available for testing. Why is that interesting? Because I don't think I've talked about the fact that Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and probably other applications within the Office suite will be available online to use to store, share, and edit documents. Google was the first major player to the collaborative document editing game, but Microsoft is the one with the the enterprise standard software spanning more than two decades of development. Google Docs and its friends are great for students and just normal folk, but has not been considered secure enough for a lot of big companies and they haven't had a whole lot of success selling it to enterprises. Given that online functionality will be free to most companies though when they upgrade to Office 2010, Microsoft will have no problem. The fact that Google Docs exists and people use it at all shows that Microsoft has fallen behind and has gotten an appropriate nudge from Google. Could Office 2010 edge out Google from the market? Probably not. It has gotten a pretty good reputation in education and some small businesses, but they will probably be marginalized to the fringes of the market unless they can somehow 1up the Office web application. I'm not saying that's possible, but from what I've heard from insiders, this is going to be a great suite of web applications.

What else is new in Office 2010? Not a whole lot. It's really just an incremental improvement over Office 12. To be honest, I'd be happy with bug fixes, performance tweaks, and an overhaul of Outlook. I love Office 12 - except for Outlook. Of course, Outlook is going to just get small improvements, as well, since fixing how heavy it is would make too much sense. What I find coolest is that OneNote will integrate online. If I can get OneNote on my Pre, I'll be happy camper because I actually prefer the OneNote UI to Evernote, but I love the portability of Evernote. It just ties back into what I was saying with Google: shouldn't they have already done the online syncing like Evernote is? It feels like Office 2010 is a response to the market more than anything else. While this disappoints me because it almost seems like everyone else is coming up with the ideas for them, I feel like Office is a market leader for a reason and this new release is likely to keep it in the lead. I hope that they take some more time for the next Office though and really give us something to provide some innovation. With all the web integration possible, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with ideas.

Azure Takes On AWS

Let's continue on with Microsoft for a bit more. With Azure, Microsoft has its crosshairs on products like Amazon Web Services that provide the digital raw materials that developers need to build their web applications. They've finally announced pricing, and it's not quite as competitive to AWS as I would've thought. I'm a little surprised that they're entering this market so late because it's definitely not an easy market to join unless you have a really big advantage, but I'm not seeing it. It sounds like their pricing structure will be more complicated than what AWS charges, but I've heard that they may be differentiating in offering more advanced services than what Amazon provides, which is where you're paying a premium. I'm sure that more details are forthcoming, and it'll be interesting to see who gets on board with them.

Microsoft Streams Music

I have one last piece of Microsoft news for you. They're planning to launch a streaming music service this month similar to Spotify that would let you stream and share any music you'd like if you can put up with some ads, or pay a monthly fee to remove the ads. I think it's going to be a huge challenge for them since music is always hairy to work with, but it could end up being awesome. A free music service that works on your computer, Xbox 360, and Zune could be very appealing. If they allow it to be on mobile devices other than the Zune, I think that they can really do well with it - but I don't imagine that they'd have it available on other platforms initially. The Internet radio market is still very experimental and while this sounds like it's freer than an Internet radio station I hope that they have the resources to create a business model for it that works well.

Nokia Gets No Love

I've recently made reference on more than one occasion that Nokia is actually the worldwide leader in cell phones even though I'm sure that if you polled people who have or know about the iPhone they'd think that Apple is king of smartphones. So why don't you see more Americans get as excited about a Nokia phone as a Blackberry or an iPhone? I think at the head of it is really their poor carrier relationships. Who's going to buy a $700 N97 (no carrier will subsidize it) when you can get a $200 iPhone or Pre (or a Blackberry for even less)? The next biggest thing has to be their software. Whenever I've shopped for a phone I've never been impressed by a Symbian phone. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if more people in the U.S. have heard of webOS than Symbian. Despite how long its been around, they haven't attracted a lot of great applications. Without that, how can they have a long tailed future? I think that there's more room for a pendulum swing in cell phones, especially smart phones, than most other markets. I think it's very possible for Nokia to fall off their throne in the next 5 years if competitors get more aggressive. With Android and the iPhone pushing harder worldwide, Nokia definitely has cause for concern. It's only a matter of time before Palm gets its worldwide strategy in place, as well. I think that their inability to attract American consumers is a leading indicator that they're not going to be able to attract international excitement for their products either.



Facebook Pimps Your Photos

Facebook has really been making it too easy to take jabs at them. The Download Squad blog called them out for farming out users' pictures in advertisements served to their friends. While it could be disabled, it was initially turned on by default. This is pretty slimy, in my opinion. I don't see any scenario in which it's ok to use people's likenesses to sell products without compensating them. If stuff like this continues to crop up, I definitely see users wondering how they can trust Facebook.

TechCrunch Uses Leaked Twitter Documents

I don't really have a lot to say about this story, but it's important enough to bring up for you to think about it. An undisclosed hacker managed to gain access to the account for a Twitter employee and leaked some private documents. Techcrunch bought access to these documents and is prepared to use information from them while Twitter feels that they're acting on stolen trade secrets. I'm rooting for Twitter here: even if TechCrunch didn't steal the documents, it's unethical as a journalist to spread stolen information in the face of being asked not to. They're not really journalists though, they're bloggers. Their audience isn't as big as many newspapers, so do they count? Since mass media sometimes gets tipped off from these blogs, I think so. What do you think?

Final Stories

Once again, I'm out of time. Let's go for a lightning round!

The DDoS attacks I mentioned last week against the US and South Korea may have just been the work of some hooligans inn Asia since the attack seemed rather unsophisticated.

Microsoft reportedly was called by someone at Apple who asked them to stop running the laptop hunters ad campaign. Much to Apple's chagrin, the ads are, in fact, working.

ShareTV has recently grown quite a bit and aggregated a lot more TV shows. This is a great site to use as your digital television portal.

Amazon launched a store for outdoor recreation!

If you've ever seen a piece of computer circuitry and stared at it in wonder, now you can look up what it is.

Mashable posted a bunch of inspirational design videos from Vimeo that I think are really neat. It's worth checking out for fun (especially Muto).

Popular Mechanics has a cool story about the next evolution of touchscreen technology being buttons that can pop-up when necessary. Very cool idea for dealing with touch keyboards.

Apple has blocked the Pre from syncing with iTunes in the latest update, but that's been overshadowed by the release of the Mojo SDK! I still need to play with it (was having install issues tonight).

I don't know if I'll have a post up next Sunday since my parents are going to be here, but I've been working on an essay that I'll be putting up either next Sunday or the following Sunday. Have a great week!

The Pre Gets a Release Date

The Palm Pre Countdown Begins

You may think of it as smarmy or disorganized (I think the latter), but the Palm Pre has been on ice for months now with bits leaked out now and then but no release date or price until last week. Instead, they've been quietly trying to drum up hype for it. I think they honestly didn't know until earlier this month when they were going to release it. Anyway, it's going to be released on Saturday, June 6 for $200 (after a $100 mail-in rebate) with a 2-year contract to an Everything Data plan (which is required for the phone). Also, the fancy wireless Touchstone charger will be available on the same day for $70. In the interest of full disclosure: I fully plan on buying this phone on June 6 (or even earlier in the unlikely case that the lady I spoke with at Sprint today calls me back next week if they get it before June 6). The stores themselves seem to know almost nothing about the release: the store at Westlake Center told me that all they know is that they have to close early on June 5 and don't know when to even open on June 6 (though the store in U Village is opening on June 6 at 10AM - their normal hours).

What's really noteworthy about this announcement that you have to read between the lines for is that it's coming out literally 2 days before details are purported to be released on the next iPhone at Apple's WWDC keynote (see rumors and their reliability here). This topic has been debated for a little while know in anticipation because there are two schools of thought (neither of which I joined). One thought that releasing shortly before the iPhone announcement would keep Palm from being shut out in the aftermath of what's likely to be a deluge of iPhone coverage. The other believed the exact opposite: releasing before the iPhone would mean that it would only be hot for a short time before the iPhone blew it away into disinterest. I'm warming up to the former because I think that Palm and Sprint are relying heavily on guerilla fanfare and word of mouth pitting it against the iPhone. Also, I think that having it out there and a reality poses the situation as "how will the iPhone be able to best the Pre?" instead of "how can the Pre possibly best the iPhone?" Also, people are less likely to believe that the Pre is too good to be true (and, thus, default to the iPhone) if they can touch it in a store. There's risk either way, but hopefully it works out for Palm (I don't care about Sprint, just vaguely about Palm).



The first big smartphone was undoubtedly the Treo, and then came the Blackberry, and finally the iPhone. Can the Pre be next in line? Remember, jockeying to this position has been a bloody battle that neither RIM (with the Storm), nor HTC (with the G1), nor Samsung (with the Instinct) have been able to win. What you have to appreciate about the situation is that this is seriously Palm's last hope to not go bankrupt. If the Pre fails I can all but guarantee that Palm will not be around 18 months from now. They're betting big on the webOS platform and smartly abandoning the outdated and now unpopular Palm OS.

So what do they need to do to hit a home run? First of all, they need to make this thing as available as they possibly can. With an iPhone announcement for an impending iPhone imminent, they cannot afford long shortages. They're not selling a product like the Wii for which there are no equal competitors, and they risk losing people's interest fast. They need to start with a lot of momentum and keep it going forward as they start announcing other webOS phones. The Pre alone cannot save Palm, they need webOS. The Sprint CEO claims that he expects shortages for a while, but it may be presumptuous to think that people will be waiting in line early morning on June 6. I predicted it for the iPhone because of the cult of Apple and because it brought 100% brand new and innovative ideas to the mobile phone market. The Pre has some awesome principles behind it and unique ideas, but not like the iPhone in its day and it doesn't have the Apple brand. I personally think people will wait in line just because the other Sprint phones blow and we've all been waiting for a solid smartphone.

Anyway, the next thing they need is to nurture an open platform. I read on their FAQ that the Software Development Kit (SDK) will be free, which is awesome. They have the start of the forthcoming O'Reily book available freely right now, and I'm really digging it. From what I can tell, they've taken a totally opposite approach from Apple in having the code be standard Javascript and CSS and other technologies familiar to most web developers rather than Objective C (C is no longer the lingua franca of developers, Java is, which is why I still have a soft spot for Android). The fact that they're supporting the Amazon MP3 store right out of the box along with whatever offering I'm sure Sprint will have is already an impressive showing of openness. There has been no talk yet of censorship, either, so this could be a pretty killer combination to do battle with the iPhone application ecosystem. It's still an uphill battle, but they totally have a fighting chance if the SDK is easy to pick up and stays open. I know I said that Android had the potential to someday overthrow the reign of the iPhone OS, but I think the Mojo SDK (that's what they're calling it) has an even better chance now just because the Pre hardware seems to be much better than the G1. Plus, Palm has much more experience in a mobile platform than Apple or Google. I know that Palm OS is fraught with problems, but it was a pioneer much like DOS was back in the day. They were industry leaders once and have the talent to be a platform leader again once more, if they play their cards right (again, uphill battle).

In some ways, they have to be everything the iPhone is and everything that it isn't. I really really hate to keep comparing it to the iPhone. It almost disgusts me to do so, but I have to. Whether or not you like it or own one or like Apple, you have to admit that the iPhone is an incredible device that has literally captivated the world in a way that no cell phone ever has before. To break that spell, the Pre has to show that it can one up Apple. Fortunately, they have an ace in the hole: background processes. What I love from reading the SDK documentation and watching all the videos and reading the reviews is that it seeks to give you a rich experience without the complicated, overbearing interface of the Treo series. Being able to control processes by throwing the "cards" (an instance of an application) is awesome (my Treo crashes so much because the applications just don't get cleaned up). A lot of Apple fanboys claim that background processes are stupid, but they're powerful. That means that even though the Pre has no on screen keyboard right now, it could actually be legitimately added on with a software update. Conversely, copy/paste wasn't possible on the iPhone until Apple did it because you'd need the clipboard to run in a background process. Being able to have flight notifications running in the background or twitter applications or just whatever is really awesome, and they need to capitalize on that. Hopefully, they'll get Flash support soon and try to go for the hat trick.

I think I've gone on quite long enough about the Palm Pre getting a release date. I've just bottled up all these thoughts for a while now and wanted to get them out. I really hope that Palm can recover with the Pre and give Apple some fair competition, especially for their tightly controlled app store. This is the first phone since the iPhone that I truly have believed was going to be a big success (go back in the archives and read, I'm not lying), and I know that Palm is banking on it. Until June 6 though, let's not drink that hype water and just wait to get our hands on it (it'll be a long wait though, I know).

The Digital Afterlife

No, this is not the headline of a Popular Science story. Actually, I'm referring to what happens to your social networking profiles after you die. Someone at my office who was actually only 30 died very suddenly, and it made me wonder (among many things) what would happen to my Facebook profile and my e-mail and all that stuff if I die since no one else knows my passwords. At Facebook, they keep your profile up as a memorial for a couple of months before they take it down (unless family requests that it be left up longer). I guess the idea of a guest book to write down the things you wished you could say to someone before they died isn't a new concept, but I think it's a really good example of how the simplest technologies have transformed our lifestyles, even in death. I'm not implying that a Facebook memorial page is tantamount to an obituary, but it brings up the point that it may add eerie discomfort to have that profile page available. What I'm actually more fascinated by is that you may be more aware of when people die who you weren't all that close to since reading obituaries isn't a very common practice. Just some food for thought.

No Ads for Twitter

I haven't talked very much about Twitter at all here. I don't entertain all the Twitter articles on the fringe about mundane junk. Still, I do want to briefly talk about their lack of a business plan. Co-founder Biz Stone announced that they will not be going down the path of advertising and will instead go down the path of premium tools and services. Some consider this risky, but it's really not all that crazy. I don't think that Facebook is doing gangbusters with its ads, and the way people use Twitter probably doesn't lend itself well to eyeballs for banner ads. I actually buy into the Craigslist model: charge a reasonable rate to the businesses that can afford it so that it can be free for the rest. Maybe they should call this the Robin Hood model? It's admittedly a pretty liberal principle, but a company like Twitter would need something liberal.

Of course, they could also start a Twitter TV channel, like Twitmatic, which allows you to surf videos posted on Twitter via keywords. That's actually one of the few mashups for Twitter that I think is truly neat. Sometimes, you're too lazy to pick something to watch, so just let the community pick for you (in a manner of speaking).

Intel Unveils Moblin 2.0 Beta

Intel has been a key partner of Microsoft for quite a while now, but they've recently decided to try their hand at a customized flavor of Linux called Moblin. Why? Same reason as everyone else who's doing it: more control to optimize for what they care about (probably for the kinds of applications used in benchmark tests to help sell more chips). They want some form of leverage against Microsoft, but I really don't think this is going to do it. I think that pushing Linux to a mainstream consumer audience is prohibitively difficult and usually a bad idea when it's your own blend (even if they did give it to the community to continue working on) rather than one of the big, widely used/supported ones. Windows 7 is bringing in features to try to make it less intimidating to people like burning discs, easily showing content on projectors, a reliable backup utility, and the ability to record problems for easier bug fixing by Microsoft developers. An OS that's only focused on performance though (Moblin) is just way too likely to miss the mark on usability.

Final Stories
the firm
Ok, I'm starting to doze off and I've gone on way too long here. I do have some other stories I liked though, so let me give them to you to read if they pique your interest.

Wired has a good article about why e-Book texts seem so ugly: the firmware usually can't support many fonts, partially because of licensing issues. I wouldn't be too worried though: the text can only get better.

Pandora is predicting its first ever profit this year, partially because of a growing audience (thanks in no small part to the iPhone) and partially through new forms of revenue (like audio ads). I'm just glad that Pandora hasn't had to fold already and hopefully won't have to anytime soon.

Mozilla announced and posted some literature/videos about Jetpack last week, their API for encouraging add-on development using technologies that web developers should already know (kinda like the Pre's strategy). I'm a big believer in add-ons customizing your browsing experience, so this is really cool to me.

Cory Doctorow (founder of Boing Boing) wrote an awesome editorial about why net neutrality is important and censorship is terrible.

CNet posted the winners of the Webware 100, which are the best web applications in 10 different categories. Amazon is on there a few times (Google is on there several times), and it's a great place to start surfing from on a lazy Memorial Day weekend afternoon.

Gmail Labs added automatic translation!

Seattle and Dallas both made PCWorld's list for the 10 best cities to find jobs in tech - you should go over there for the full list if you're looking for somewhere to move to.

Smashing Magazine posted a great lexicon of random web development terminology.

Samsung's LED TVs are going to be nuts.

Hope you all have had a great weekend and are planing on basking in the shortened week!

Why the Kindle is the Future of Reading

My Two Cents on the Kindle

Disclaimer: I have no non-public information on the Kindle. I don't even work in the same building as those folks. The following are just my own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Amazon.com or any of its employees or partners.

I was walking home from the gym a few days ago and was listening to Buzz Out Loud bash the Kindle DX when I reached an epiphany that may be obvious but I wanted to share it anyway: the Kindle is ridiculously forward thinking and will most likely be the future of reading.

I've read several articles and heard multiple podcasts bash the Kindle, and I'm pretty tired of it. I don't own a Kindle, but playing with it for a bit was enough to sell me on it. The first thing wrong with all these "pundits" writing off the Kindle is that they're often not the target audience. Not everyone loves reading, and that's ok. The Kindle is designed for people who love reading. It's not designed to be a super sexy gadget like the iPhone or the Pre or anything like that - it's meant to be as functional as possible. I feel like we've entered a world of gadgets where style taking precedence over substance helps sales, and it sells some reporters on the devices, as well. I don't want to discredit all people that review gadgets, that's just an observation I've made about some of them. I haven't heard anyone who has a Kindle and enjoys reading tell me that they hate it or regretted getting it.

The real point I want to make is that a lot of the best technology starts out unpopular. Do you know why MSN was so late to the game with it's Internet services and web portal? Because Microsoft thought that the Internet was a fad (it's pretty hard to find a citation for this, but he definitely said something to the effect of "The Internet? We're not interested in it"). When most people hear MSN now they probably think of MSNBC, whereas the ISP didn't do all that hot (competing with the likes of AOL and Earthlink) and the web portal never caught up to Yahoo, which never caught up to Google, and the rest is history (although MSN is still around). Nowadays, the odds are slim to none that you'll go through your day without directly or indirectly interacting with the Internet. Our lives basically revolve around it, but I'll get back to this point.

There are a couple of other great examples of technologies that people mocked early on. When Jeff Bezos invented e-Commerce in 1994 with Amazon.com, people thought he was out of his mind. Why would people want to buy stuff online they could drive to their store and get instantly? Why would you buy a book that you can't flip through in a bookstore? And yet, here Amazon stands as a formidable force in retail in the U.S. with a growing presence across the world. The people who doubted Jeff Bezos weren't stupid, they just weren't thinking ahead that far. The DVD format was seen as ridiculous since it required a new player and the discs cost more without a very big jump in quality as far as most people were concerned, and yet now almost every house has a DVD player. Heck, just a couple of years ago pundits thought that the iPhone was prohibitively expensive and no one would want to pay that much money for a smartphone without a keyboard. I think we all know what happened there.

The lesson to be learned here is that you can't believe what you hear in mainstream media - take it with a grain of salt. The common thread is that the doubters weren't forward thinking. The iPhone provided so much value and gave people such a rich experience that price just wasn't an issue to them. The Kindle is expensive, and yet people are still buying them. I don't need top secret information to know that - I see them outside on the bus and at the gym. Amazon sold out of them this past winter. If you don't want to believe that, you have to believe that 35% of sales on all books that have a Kindle edition are that Kindle edition. Books are the bedrock that Amazon.com was founded on, so 35% of a book's sales being for the Kindle is a pretty big deal. As much as all these journalists want to naysay, people aren't being deterred.



So why are people paying so much for a device that serves a single function? In a way, I think it serves a lot of functions. Not to sound like a broken record, but we live in an information society. Think about that for a second. The amount of knowledge we have available instantly at our fingertips has grown dramatically in the past couple of decades. I'd posit that people are actually becoming smarter because even though they haven't to remember less stuff overall since they can always just look it up, they also look up and learn more stuff because they can. We know names of random actors and actresses because of IMDB. Small underground artists are building worldwide fanbases through digital distribution. Let's face it, books aren't as portable as we'd like to think. If we want to read multiple books, we have to carry them in a bag. If you're a student - this really sucks (especially math and science texts). The Kindle not only lets you carry all these books in a thin, easy to carry package, but you can get leverage the Internet to get books directly onto it. Past that though, you can highlight and make notes without damaging the book, and you have more room than just the margins. Plus, you can define words you don't know on the fly (context clues don't always work), and having that kind of power for younger students can really encourage their thirst for knowledge.

If I'm not convincing you by now then maybe I'm just not explaining it right, but the Kindle is an improvement on a dying technology. People just don't have a whole lot of free time anymore. We wait around a lot, or ride public transit, or do other random things where we happened to be free, but it's not really free time. That's why carry mp3 players to fill that time. Books often lose the battle for our time because they're just not as convenient as carrying your iPod. If a Kindle is portable enough to carry to a gym, then it's portable enough for most anything. I fully understand that people love the feel of books, but people love the feel of CDs and yet they're still around while mp3s are popular. Why can't the same be true for books? I think books will die off in favor of digital copies some day, but that's a really long time from now. The Kindle may be a bit ahead of its time, but it's going to take a while for it to really catch on because an e-Reader is such a radical concept. Amazon has just done well because they have the online book store with access from where ever.

As for price: the first iPod and iPhone were expensive at first, too, but the price went down. Same with HD TVs, DVD players, personal computers, laptops, etc. It's going to be a while. For college students, the cost of a Kindle DX amortized over 4 years would easily be cheaper than real textbooks if the cost of these books were maybe half (even without the ability to re-sell books). For grade schools this could put a huge dent in their budgets if they could give each kid one of these and pay less for books (plus the drop in administrative costs if they could be managed remotely). The possibilities for education are really endless, and it's really a lot easier to study if your books are always with you in a portable device. I know I would've gotten more done.

Ok, I think I've gone on long enough. I hope that thoughts haven't been all that scattered, I just feel like I need to stand up for the Kindle because I honestly believe in it. I think that Amazon has been really smart so far in its diversification of not only its stores and acquisitions but also AWS, and I think that the Kindle is another key cog in its future (much like when Apple jumped into mp3 players and cell phones, which ended up re-vitalizing the Mac). The Kindle vision is "every book, every made, in any language, available in under 60 seconds". That vision is immensely inspiring. It feels pie in the sky, but it is possible. I think that alone should be enough to sell people on the idea of the Kindle being the future of reading. The idea of having the entirety of human knowledge available at your fingertips in under a minute is priceless. The Internet has taken us on that path, but it doesn't have the full text of every book every made in any language. The point I really want to get across is that we're at the forefront of an entirely new industry, much like digital music when Napster got big or the beginning of the end of broadcast television as we know it when Hulu came out - savor the moment. Don't buy into the hype and don't buy into the cynics, just be reasonable. That's all I ask.

Microsoft vs. Apple Ads

The advertising war between Microsoft and Apple is alive as well. It was pretty lopsided for a while, probably partially because Microsoft didn't want to seem like it was bullying an underdog, but Apple pushed too hard and woke the sleeping giant. The latest spin out of Redmond (aside from the commercials where people buy cheap PCs) is that it costs $30,000 to fill an iPod. The reason they can get around this with the Zune is that it's subscription-based, which has the advantage that for $15 a month you get all you can eat music plus you can keep 10 of them each month. Anyway, I still thought that this was kind of a stupid tactic from Microsoft, but meanwhile Apple came up with an attack that you couldn't get a PC without the stuff people hate about computers.

Which is a more ridiculous ad? The answer is that they're equally crazy. You may think that the Zune one is more dumb because most people already have a library of CDs and music to fill up their mp3 player with, but the Mac ad doesn't make any sense. Macs aren't as stable as people think they are - if you use certain software you will see crashes. I used iMovie for few months on a Mac Pro last spring and it crashed almost each time I used it. There are definitely security vulnerabilities for Macs, too, and it totally ignores the inflated price of a Mac. I'm not saying that Macs are bad computers, but these ads are slinging mud. They know that people won't fact check, but they're not quite slanderous so Apple can get away with them. My point is simply that when Microsoft comes up with ads like this Zune one, just remember who cast the first stone.

I have one more thing to slip in here: Google started airing a Google Chrome ad created internally by Google Japan just for fun. It's interesting that they care this much about Chrome (what's their master plan?) and that they're using a competing advertising venue to sell themselves.

Facebook's Funny Money

Ok so they don't really call it funny money, but I still can. Facebook is toying with an idea that's certainly not inventive, but it could definitely help them get on the track of a successful business model. They're testing a payments system with developers where virtual money can be used between applications to buy and sell virtual (or I suppose even physical) goods and services. It would make buying stuff easier and safer (like getting a wristband of money at a water park), and Facebook taking a cut of the transactions could help them replace/supplement their oft controversial advertising model with something less obtrusive. I don't really know if it'll work because I don't know if people will really trust Facebook with their money or want to buy what third party developers offer, but I'm definitely anxious to see what happens.

Meanwhile, their employees are going in the opposite direction: having imaginary money turned into real cash. Facebook has sought funding (to the tune of $150 million) from private investors to buy back their employees' stock to keep loyal employees around who have been chomping at the bit for a cut of the profits they were promised but haven't come to fruition quite yet. Won't people leave if they get rich off their stock? More importantly though, isn't this a dangerous financial decision? $150 million seems like a lot of money to bet if they don't come up with a good business model before their star burns out. I hope they know what they're doing.

Final Notes

Aside from being tired from today (didn't sleep enough last night), I think you're tired of reading this post by now (assuming that anyone is actually still reading this). Let me link you to a few other interesting tidbits before I send you on your merry way:

Google has launched a search options feature to try to get themselves closer to real-time search. They're actually pretty nifty.

The CEO of Sony Pictures admitted that he doesn't see anything good as having come from the Internet. You don't have to scroll up very far to get my opinions on the glory of the Internet, but it goes to show how backwards the movie industry can be and why licensing for TV shows and movies and their related properties is so wacky. If their CEO is living in the past then how can they hope to have a future?

The judge in the Pirate Bay trial has been under fire recently for having been involved in a pro-copyright association in Sweden (which he claims didn't bias him), but now they're starting to discover that his appointment may not have been random (as is supposed to be the case in Sweden). The plot thickens! Will it be called a mistrial?

Smashing Magazine has a really well-written article on how to optimize your website's conversion rates with usable designs, and it's full of pretty pictures. I love the concepts they point out here, and I think it's worth a read if you're interested in usability at all.

Coldplay is releasing their live album for free. Enjoy.

I hope you all have a great week! I think I'm going to spend my nights trying to learn how to play this.