Apropos Julian’s excellent story of watchlist incompetence, a Slashdot commenter linked to this gem:
Technology, Business & Cool Toys 
Tom Lee critiques professional gossip-turned-professional-navel-gazer Emily Gould, who has a new article about the supposed shallowness of Shirky style Internet triumphalism:
Gould thinks Shirky is a callow idealist, but he’s not. He’s just noting the incredible bounty that technology can afford us while politely declining to complain about the places where it falls short.
Not only is Gould preoccupied with the latter, she’s blind to the former. And hey, I can relate. Digital technology has its own Benjaminian aura, you know — excitement born of novelty, and exclusivity, and revolutionary rhetoric. Once that novelty wears off, though, things can start to look kind of drab. I mean, it’s exciting that the world has collaboratively built an encyclopedia! But it is an encyclopedia. And the idea of an encyclopedia — a comprehensive reference document written without passion or position — is actually kind of boring. The same holds for social communication and our lofty rhetoric about the triumph of a world where information can flow freely. Once you’re done patting yourself on the back you need to start paying attention to what people are actually saying. And that’s hard. Sometimes it’s even boring.
It’s depressing when you realize how much of your excitement about a thing was tied up in its aura; to find out that superficial considerations formed the basis of your enthusiasm. I struggle with this myself: I’m overcome with contempt at every useless, vowel-less internet startup I see, its founders desperate to think of themselves as brilliant revolutionaries despite no one — least of all them — actually caring a whit about what they say they’re trying to do. But that contempt is motivated in no small part by feeling the exact same ignoble impulse.
I think this is basically right, but I’d make a somewhat stronger case. It’s certainly true that the most superficial aspects of the Internet get a lot of press, but I think it’s important not to let the existence of such froth obscure the enormous flow of real, non-superficial value that the Internet revolution is producing. The non-frothy parts of the Internet seem boring precisely because they’ve become so profoundly important to our society that we’ve started taking them for granted.
Continue reading →
How much platform competition is too much competition? For example, what is the optimal number of mobile operating systems or video game consoles that will spur competition and innovation in those respective sectors?
It is an interesting business question, but it also has some policy implications since some might propose laws or regulations to remedy a perceived lack of platform competition in various sectors. After all, many people would answer the above question by saying that there is never such a thing as too much competition. The more platforms the better. But there can be costs associated with too much competition. Let’s consider those two case studies mentioned above: mobile operating systems or video game consoles.
Mobile Operating Systems
As my colleague Berin Szoka has pointed out, we are witnessing the rapid proliferation of mobile operating systems, especially on the open source front. So, we’ve got Apple’s iPhone platform, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Symbian, Google’s Android, the LiMo platform, and OpenMoko.
One one hand, all this platform competition sounds great. But as Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal’s “Business Tech Blog” points out in a piece today:
Continue reading →
Channeling Jonathan Zittrain, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge continues his incessant ranting against Apple and the iPhone for supposedly not being open enough and, therefore, somehow harming consumers and 3rd party developers. In his essay today about the supposed evils of the iPhone App Store, he accuses Apple of an “1984 kind of total control.”
Hmmm, let’s see… Apple creates a great new product that is so insanely sexy and innovative that even Apple-haters like me are forced to admit that it is the most brilliant tech gadget of the decade. Millions of people have flocked to Apple stores, stood in lines so long that you’d think they were giving away free pot and floor bongs inside, and then voluntarily handed over seemingly all their disposable monthly income to get their hands on one of these things.
OK, so how is this like 1984 again? Is evil Steve Jobs forcing the masses to buy this product? Of course not. So it strikes me that we can easily dispense with analogies to a book about coercive, totalitarian government control like 1984.
And if all this anti-iPhone ranting is just about the degree of control that Steve Jobs and Apple exercise over product add-ons then hey, I’ve got an easy answer for you: go get a different phone!
Continue reading →
This is fascinating. A co-blogger on my other blog did a very short post about the Russia-Georgia conflict. Within a few hours, we got 11 comments, not obviously spam, from different IP addresses, all of them pro-Russian. And, it should be noted, my other blog gets even less traffic than this one does, so it’s extremely unlikely that I just happen to have dozens of Russian readers who have never commented before.
I’m really curious why this happened. I can think of three explanations:
I think any of these three options has interesting implications. Perhaps we’ll find out which it is by the response (or absence thereof) to this post.
There are apparently people who believe that it’s some kind of technological Faux pas to type a website’s URL into the search bar. As Joe Weisenthal points out, this is completely nonsense. There are a number of good reasons to use the search bar even if you have a pretty good idea of a site’s URL.
Beyond the specific reasons Joe gives, there’s a more fundamental issue of cognitive economy. URLs have to be exact, and so remembering them takes a non-trivial amount of cognitive effort. If I want to remember the Institute for Humane Studies website, I have to remember that it’s theIHS, and that it’s a .org rather than a .com or a .net. But if I type “IHS” into Google, the Institute for Humane Studies is the third search term. If I type something a little more descriptive, like humane studies, it comes up as the first result. Search terms don’t have to be exact, and so they tend to be much easier to remember: type something in the general vicinity of what you’re looking for, and Google will find it for you.
The point isn’t that I couldn’t remember theihs.org. Rather, it’s that remembering the URLs of all the websites you visit is a waste of cognitive energy in exactly the same way that it would be a waste to remember IP addresses rather than domain names. Technically speaking, the IP address lookup would be faster, but the difference is so trivial that it’s swamped by the fact that the human brain isn’t as good at remembering 32-bit numbers as it is at remembering well-chosen domain names. By the same token, even if the search bar isn’t the “right” place to put URLs, it will, in practice and on average, be the quickest way for actual human beings to get to the sites they’re looking for.
This is an example of a general attitudinal problem that’s distressingly common among geeks. Geeks have an tendency to over-value lower-level layers of the technology stacks based on the misguided belief that higher-level technologies are unnecessarily wasteful. Many geeks’ preference for text over graphics, command lines over GUIs, text editors over word processors, and so forth seems to too often be motivated by this kind of false economy. (To be clear I’m not claiming that there aren’t good reasons for preferring command lines, text editors, etc, just that this particular reason is bogus.) What they miss is that human time and attention is almost always more scarce than the trivial amount of computing power they’re conserving by using the less complex technology. The 2 seconds it takes me to remember a website’s URL is worth a lot more than the tenth of a second that it takes Google to respond to a search query.
I wrote here sometime back about e-gold, a very interesting value-transfer business suffering through some difficult legal troubles. They have now pled guilty to criminal charges.
A blog post by e-gold’s Douglas Jackson calls it a “new beginning.” The company will pay some fines, get square with U.S. regulatory law, and go on providing its services.
Payments is an interesting business. Once value is de-linked from a physical asset, representations of it can be transferred electronically, by “wire” or over the Internet. As is already happening with intellectual property, people will eventually create value transfer systems that operate outside the control of any government.
Whether the Secret Service and the Justice Department like it or not, e-gold is the next step in the beginning of the end of government-controlled currency. I don’t expect governments to lose control of payments quickly or to give it up easily, but they will.
After resisting the iPhone siren song for a year, I’ve finally surrendered and joined the 3G bandwagon. Getting a functional iPhone required three store visits and a combined 4 hours of waiting, but I think it was worth it. I’ll warn you in advance that this is going to be a bit of unabashed Apple-fanboyism.
As a long-time Mac user, I was expecting to like the iPhone quite a bit, but I’ve still been pleasantly surprised by the user interface. Apple’s UI engineers pay attention to detail to a degree that no other technology company can match. Most technology products—especially relatively new ones— tend to have a significant number of rough edges: places where the engineers got the feature working so it could be added to the marketing checklist, but clearly didn’t put in a ton of effort beyond that point. In contrast, consider the following random anecdotes:
Global handset manufacturing giant Nokia has purchased the shares they didn’t already own in Symbian, Ltd., the company formed in 1998 as a partnership among Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion and the developer of the Symbian mobile operating system, by far the world’s leading OS for “smart mobile” phones with 67% of the market, followed by Microsoft on 13%, with RIM on 10% (source).
But wait, there’s more (per Engadget)!
Here’s where it gets interesting, though: rather than taking Symbian’s intellectual private for Nokia’s own benefit, the goods will be turned over to the Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit whose sole goal will be the advancement of the Symbian platform in its many flavors. Motorola and Sony Ericsson have signed up to contribute UIQ assets, while NTT DoCoMo (which uses Symbian-based wares in a number of its phones) will be donating code as well.
Other Symbian Foundation members include Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T (yep, the same AT&T that currently sells precisely one Symbian-based phone), so things could get interesting. The move clearly seems to be a preemptive strike against Google’s Open Handset Alliance, LiMo, and other collaborative efforts forming around the globe with the goal of standardizing smartphone operating systems; the writing was on the wall, and Symbian didn’t want to miss the train. Total cash outlay for the move will run Nokia roughly €264 million — about $410 million in yankee currency.
Other reports note that the Symbian Foundation will eventually take Symbian open source, and that this move is as much as response to Apple’s closed iPhone platform as it is to Gogole’s open Android and LiMo platforms. (Although it is intriguing to note that AT&T, Apple’s exclusive U.S. partner for the iPhone, is among the backers of the new Symbian Foundation, perhaps indicating that even AT&T is hedging its bets.)
The fact that we will soon see three open source platforms (counting Google’s Android and LiMo) competing for market share provides yet another measure of the exceptionally high degree of competition in the wireless industry. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.