The only malware that we know of in the Apple ecosystem is software that Apple blessed through its review process. The stuff that grabs whatever it can and uploads it to their private servers. Do you think Apple has "dipped" into our private data for its own purposes? Why wouldn't they -- everyone else was doing it. And btw, they still are doing it. They promised to change the way the system works, but they haven't changed it yet. And what about all the data that was uploaded who-knows-where. Can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. How many apps do you have on your iPad or iPhone? Do you know which ones are hacking your life right now?? Is Apple helping you? I don't see any evidence of actual help. All this on the day before they announce that they're going to apply the same approach that worked so well on iOS on Mac OS.

 2/16/2012; 7:50:14 PM.   .

I finally got to watch a Knicks game last night with Jeremy Lin.

My favorite Lin moment was when he dribbled the ball all around every opposition player and they were all just standing there with no idea what to do. It was like Bugs Bunny making fun of Elmer Fudd. Wonderful basketball. Or just plain wonderful.

Another amazing thing is that there's no doubt he's the captain on the court. How did that happen so quickly? They communicate so well. But how long have they been playing as a team? Not very long!

And the other guys were so inept and demoralized. One of the players, Cousins I think is his name, was angry the whole game. Even after he scored he was angry. What gives. And the Knicks were having so much fun. I hope it was real. I believe it is.

Jeremy Lin is every bit as powerful as Occupy, in fact I see it as an extension of Occupy. I hope he stays true to who he is. A guy who broke in by dint of sheer excellence, determination, intellect and power. He's the absolute example of what's possible, and he just couldn't be more in tune with the times.

And I absolutely love that he came out of Harvard. It's one of things I learned when I was there as a fellow. It's possible at Harvard to be individually creative. It's got lots of politics, as do all large organizations. But if you really insist, you can do something unique there. I think that makes it an unusual campus that way. Not sure.

 2/16/2012; 11:31:57 AM.   .

It took me less than 2 minutes to create this site.

http://crazyones.blorkmark.com/

And 30 seconds of it was waiting for DNS to propagate.

 2/16/2012; 11:23:36 AM.   .

It was totally predictable that Apple would move in the direction they're moving. And of course it was predicted here, to which Apple zealots said but you have a choice. They still say that. Over time the Apple-approved choices will get smaller. This is what I refer to as the disneyfication of computing. It's inexorable.

I prefer if Microsoft would zig to Apple's zag, to match every Apple move to close off their ecosystem to ever-more-docile programmers, with an equivalent move to invite in the most creative to work in their space. In the first of many such analogies for sure, there are Jeremy Lins out there in the software world. They don't work for Microsoft or Apple, and more and more they won't fit into their developer programs. What are we to do about it?

The first thing to do is to make sure there's a distribution of Linux that matches the current-day Mac in ease of use. This fork will not go down the same path as Mac OS, it will not become a tablet computer on a desktop. It won't be owned by Google and it won't be disneyfied, although it should be protected for users with anti-malware updates, on a regular basis. The funding should come from organizations who have an interest in not being restricted by Apple, Google and the rest of the tech industry. Hopefully the latest fiasco with address books was enough to alert others that the tech industry is not so benign.

Another thing we have to be sure of is that there is an easy-to-install server that runs outside Microsoft, Apple or Google environments, that does great easy cloud-like things out of the box. My offerings will include: 1. Linkblog, 2. River and 3. Worldoutline modules. People should be making server apps that a technical user can install. And for that we need a server platform that really works and is as easy as it can possibly be to set up and administer. We must work on ease of use. Iterate. Bootstrap. Turn users into developers. Repeat.

And we should cement our relationship with companies like Amazon and Rackspace, that make it easy to boot up a virtual server in their clouds. This is important, very very important and should be encouraged and more investments made.

And the universities should get into the middle of this, the way the Internet booted up out of academia in the 70s and 80s. It's the young creative people who have the most at stake here. People my age have our live's work invested in the open platform. But the creative people coming of age today must have a place where they can try out all their ideas, not just the ones that play in a theme park run by the tech industry. We had that freedom when we were young, and were able to create great things from it. We must pass on a wonderful cyber-world to the next generation, not a crippled one.

It's time to stop thinking of ourselves as happy users and start thinking about our future independent of the tech industry. We need a platform for creativity, but instead we're headed to Disneyland. FrontierLand, not the frontier.

 2/16/2012; 10:54:19 AM.   .

You might get an STD if you have unprotected sex, but even the smartest people from time to time throw caution to the wind. In the heat of the moment.

Look, no one likes it when you shout Fire in a movie theater when everyone is really loving the movie. But if there's a fire you should probably ignore people's prefs and shout anyway. Like the people who said it was a bubble when housing prices kept going up, when we're fighting two wars but feeling no pain at home. Something was wrong with that picture.

Something is wrong with today's picture too. There isn't room for every college undergrad to drop out and start a new company. VCs that encourage this, and it seems they all do, are no better than mortgage brokers that put immigrants who couldn't speak English into McMansions.

All these fake startups need us to let them have our personal data, the same way the mortgage arbitrageurs needed all those junk mortgages to bundle up into AAA securities. The companies the VCs are starting now are garbage too. The kids who are jumping out of college to get rich are screwing themselves. And the universities that are shoveling their kids out of the door, some even saying openly they want to make money off the next Zuck or Gates, a lot of them are going to go the way of Lehman Brothers. And I don't think there's going to be much in the way of bailouts coming for them.

All you need for a bubble is a steady stream of suckers.

It's all connected. The fact that they're pushing our data up into the cloud is just one more facet of it. You can be sure they're not being squeaky clean about what they do with this data. If you think ethics are big in boardrooms in Silicon Valley, you have yourself to blame because the facts that say otherwise are staring you in the face.

 2/15/2012; 12:34:47 PM.   .

I got a bug report yesterday that said that River2 no longer works properly with Atom feeds from blogspot.com. I looked into it, and saw the behavior that was reported.

I'm not at all sure what happened. But if you have some knowledge about how this is supposed to work, have a look at this feed, and look at an <entry>. See how it has a lot of link elements? Which one is supposed to point to the article? Is that part of some standard? Are other sites doing it this way, or just blogspot.com?

If it were RSS, I'd be looking for a guid element with isPermaLink true. If that weren't present, I'd accept a link element. I'm looking for the same thing from this Atom feed. I want to give the user a pointer to the article that's being linked to from the feed.

It looks to me like that's the link with the rel attribute equal to "alternate." But I don't know, and I don't want to modify the code that's meant to deal with generic Atom feeds if this is just a workaround for blogspot.com.

The usual caveat that this could be my bug, not theirs.

Also it would be helpful to see any changenotes or technotes from Google that explains how we're meant to interpret their Atom feeds. Would help increase confidence.

Update: Problem resolved, with help from Dan and Ted.

 2/15/2012; 9:17:22 AM.   .

The Verge and VentureBeat are both running user-oriented stories about the iPhone address book issue. Both are explaining it in terms of what apps are doing with your data. Up till now the tech press has been focusing on personality issues.

Anyway go read the Verge and VentureBeat pieces, and let's keep going.

 2/14/2012; 9:33:50 PM.   .

Can't get the tech press/bloggers to focus on the core issue in AddressBookGate, so let's do it ourselves.

Which of the apps on my iPhone is transmitting everything I think is private and to whom are they transmitting it?

I'm not an iOS developer so I can't answer this question myself.

But lots of iOS developers read this site, so could you help quantify the extent of the problem?

Paul Robichaux just posted this. "The iOS address book is one of the few data stores that apps can easily access, along with the music library and the camera roll. Other data types, like the store of SMS messages, aren't accessible. The full list is available in the iOS developer documentation. "

Very helpful. So it's reasonable to assume that our music and photos are out there, in addition to our contact info.

Update: Other info any iOS app can access -- 1. Calendar (read/write) via the EventKit API and 2. Cellular carrier info via CTCarrier.

 2/14/2012; 11:45:39 AM.   .

Dan Lyons blasts Mike Arrington and MG Siegler for being relatively cheap PR reps for the companies they blog about.

It's fun to read, up to a point, because he says so well what we've been thinking about these guys. But there's a problem with all this, including Lyons' post. They're changing the subject. Making it about personalities not address books.

Users are exposed, maybe millions of them, and the tech industry hasn't offered to help. Or even to stop.

Which of the apps on my iPhone is transmitting everything I think is private and to whom are they transmitting it?

 2/13/2012; 7:08:53 PM.   .

The idea of companies reacting to crises about product quality issues is not new.

The first time I personally encountered it, on the other side of the equation -- as a vendor -- was with copy protection in the 80s. We were doing it like "everyone else" was. Kind of like the address book scandal that's breaking out now.

My company wasn't the main target of the outrage, Lotus Development was. That doesn't mean we didn't get punished by our customers, we did. And we deserved it, and like everyone else, eventually we gave the customers what they wanted. But it took too long. And I learned an important lesson here. It totally influenced my thinking about the role of vendors in relation to customers, and who's really doing the innovating.

The first tech crisis that came about after the birth of the blogosphere was the controversy about floating point math errors in Intel chips. A professor in Virginia had discovered that under some circumstances the math processor in an Intel chip would return the wrong answer! You could demo it in an Excel spreadsheet. The company responded at first with a technical answer, explaining how unlikely it is that anyone would ever see an incorrect result. As an engineer and mathematician and computer guy, I understood what they were saying, and was willing, personally, to take them at their word. But this did not go over at all with users and the press. Computers are supposed to be perfect. No bugs allowed. They didn't care how unlikely it is -- fix it! That seemed to be what people were saying. Intel tried to wait it out. They tried to stonewall it. I don't remember if they ever attacked the critics personally as we're seeing in the industry response to AddressBookGate, but if they had it wouldn't have gotten the results they were hoping for.

Eventually Intel had to relent and offered to replace anyone's CPU with one that didn't have the bug. The cost of the exchange was huge. Not just in dollars spent on fixing the problem, but in reputation and trust lost. People found out that computer chips were fallable. This is not something they wanted to know. And had Intel responded initially with the response they eventually had to implement, the cost would have been much lower. It cost them a lot to try to douse the flames, and it didn't work.

The classic textbook example of a crisis perfectly handled was the Tylenol tampering incident in 1982. Some unknown person had put cyanide poison in a few bottles of Tylenol in Chicago, and seven users died as a result. This was not something, in the opinion of Johnson & Johnson, the owners of the product, they could brush off, or explain. They immediately, with no hesitation, took responsibility. They emptied store shelves of their product, even though the vast majority of them were not poisoned. They did not re-introduce the product until they had a process in place that would guarantee not that it was unlikely their product would be tampered with (Intel's defense) but guaranteed that it was impossible. All the double-security packaging you see on medical and food products these days is a result of that incident in 1982. That industry went from being innocent about possible security issues to passionate about it. It could have been the death, not only of seven customers, but of the brand. Tylenol quickly came back to the top, and trust in their product and the company went up as a result of the incident.

And when Tylenol communicated about the incident, they validated people's concerns, they did not dismiss them, or minimize them. They have families too! No one wants to take a pain reliever thinking it might be poison. They understood. They are humans, like we are.

This is what the tech industry should be learning. Will the adults in the industry get with the CEOs, behind closed doors, and coach them on this process. You simply can't win by trying to intimidate people who ask serious questions about the security of your products.

The truth is that repressive, murderous governments have been caught hacking into commercial vendors servers to get information about people they want to repress or murder. They use social networks to find out who they are associating with. This is a problem that is recognized by all serious security experts. It's not something you can or should want to brush aside. Here's a chance for your companies to shine. Instead the response has been even more sequestered than Intel's response to a much more benign issue, 18 years ago. It's time to make this change in tech, once and for all. Your products are not toys, they are used seriously by real people. You need to show respect for your product, and that means respect for your users.

 2/13/2012; 8:50:26 AM.   .

I have two smartphone-like devices -- A Samsung Galaxy/S on T-Mobile, and an Apple iPhone 4 that does not currently have a service plan. I also have a Google Voice account that I use for calls from my desktop. My NY apartment has awful cellphone coverage, so most of the calls I make are via Google Voice.

Until I used Path for the first and only time in late 2010, it never occured to me to ask whether the contents of my address book on the iPhone are private. As I said in the blog post I wrote at the time, this can't be a legit part of someone's business model, because I pay for the right to keep my address book on the iPhone.

But I learned before, that even though Apple jealously guards its own secrets, it doesn't help its customers protect their information from being shared with the world. I learned this when a hard drive stopped working. I bought a replacement from Apple, and they refused to give me the old drive. I had to raise the issue all the way up to Steve Jobs to get the hard drive back. I was really disappointed to see this. I thought of Apple as a highly competent company, and this lack of concern for their customers says something completely different about their competence. For the month it was out of my hands, I have no idea where it was, if it was backed up, and where the data on the drive might have ended up.

I am disappointed that programmers at Path and at Apple and perhaps dozens of other tech companies lack the ethics to stop their employers from using any data they can easily put their hands on. This is like a doctor who sees your wallet on your hospital room nightstand, and copies your credit card numbers, driver's license number, social security card, pictures of family members. It's there. No one is protecting it. Right? But it's even worse. It's as if the hospital had a policy to copy the info in all wallets left on patient's nightstands.

All these are moral questions, important, but not totally pragmatic.

The pragmatic question, for Apple to answer, is this.

Can users store private information on iPhones and iPads and at the same time use apps?

Pretty simple. It seems to me that the two actions are incompatible. If you install even one app on your iPhone or iPad, all your data is compromised. Since the tech industry is the predator here, we have to think for ourselves.

This is the issue that Consumer Reports and the FTC should be looking into. How about Congressional hearings? Bend over backwards to protect users the same way you would protect the entertainment industry.

I would have added that the NY Times should be weighing in too, but they already have. And Nick Bilton, writing in the Times, was right that information in address books, in some contexts, is a matter of life and death. In some countries in some contexts people do get killed for talking to reporters.

 2/13/2012; 5:41:22 AM.   .

Nick Bilton at the NY Times writes: "Lawyers I spoke with said that my address book-- which contains my reporting sources at companies and in government -- is protected under the First Amendment. On Path's servers, it is frightfully open for anyone to see and use."

It's a wonderful piece and the first time in memory that any news organization has made the Silicon Valley buddy-net the issue. There really is an adversarial relationship between today's technology suppliers and the users of the technology.

The mainstream press is breathless over the money, but look past that to what they're selling, and your adoration might turn to anger and fear. It's you and me that they're selling.

I'm glad that at least one reporter at the Times has the guts to go in there.

 2/12/2012; 1:25:48 PM.   .

Roger Ebert writes on Twitter: "Each and every change to my Twitter page is a Bad Idea. Did they go berserk?"

I'll paraphrase in terms that software developers will understand. "It burns my braincells when you guys move stuff around for no good reason."

He's totally right.

For example. I use a new version of a famous browser on one of my servers. No choice, because I deployed the server after the old version expired. They moved the Refresh icon. Seems like a little thing. Perhaps they user-tested it with web newbies and found it made more sense to them to separate it from all the other icons. But I don't think when I reach for Refresh. I don't have to. My brain commands the browser to "Refresh" and the base of my spine instructs my fingers to click the icon. The "howto" of this never reaches my intellect. Until they move the icon.

They're always moving stuff around in software like this. This is a lesson every generation of developers seems to have to re-learn. Little things like this break users. So what. Once you have competition and look into why people switch, you'll find that "it just works" or "it works like I think" is a highly valued non-feature. It's not something that you can put on a comparison chart. To users it's a subjective thing. It has to do with whether they like you or not. To you however, it's engineering. This feeling is created from hundreds of little subjectives they don't even see, that Ebert would totally understand. In film it's called suspension of disbelief. We don't yet have a name for this in software.

An analogy. I like driving cars with a steering wheel in front of me, a brake pedal on the floor and radio controls on the dashboard. Sounds silly when you put it like that. But computers aren't such new things anymore. Time for them to settle down and become the utilities they are. Tools for guys like Ebert to inform and entertain.

When Twitter moves things around gratuitously, true, Ebert has no choice but to continue to use Twitter, at least for now.

 2/12/2012; 7:45:40 AM.   .

I've heard people say it privately, and in random comments here and there, that Facebook was already doing what Path was caught doing. Because it hadn't been said publicly, I didn't have anything I felt I could respond to. But now there's an article at PC World that at least leans toward saying that what Path is doing with address books on the iPhone is nothing more than what Facebook did with their iPhone app.

I checked with Joe Hewitt, the guy who wrote the iPhone app for Facebook and asked if they did what Path is doing. He said no. It was unequivocal.

Since Joe left Facebook a few months ago, he asked me to make it clear that he can't vouch for what they're doing now.

BTW, when I quote a programmer like this, it's because I know him, and trust him. Joe and I may disagree on some things, but I would never question his ability as a developer or his honor. This came up the other day on Twitter when I quoted Brent Simmons on something he told me about iOS. I feel the same way about Brent as I do about Joe. Both are first class pros, and their word is beyond questioning.

And...

Brent says that as an iOS developer he wouldn't read a user's address book without asking first, and he doesn't know any iOS developers who would either. So if we condone what Path has done, we're giving them an advantage that other developers are not willing to take. In other words, we've bet on the wrong horse.

 2/10/2012; 2:10:50 PM.   .

Julie Posetti, on Twitter, asks if you could write a letter to your 15-year-old self, what would you say. It took about five minutes to remember that I had an answer ready. And I would send the message to all 15-year-olds, not just me. It's really simple.

What you think matters.

At age 56, I wish someone would send me a letter, today, that says that. I'm always having to remind myself, when someone says something challenging. Dave, what you think matters.

For example, Dave Morin of Path sent me a message yesterday saying it wasn't cool for me to "call him a liar." How to respond. To say I didn't call him a liar, even though I did say he had lied. Slight distinction. He also called me by my last name, something that makes me uncomfortable. When I typed his name into the response, Android changed it to "moron" -- which gave me a laugh (I corrected its correction). So other people have awkard names too! Heh. But what I said to him actually made me feel good. I said "It looks as if you lied." That's an important statement because it re-asserts what I said, and it also says that it matters how it looks to me. It's true. I'm not 100 percent sure of anything (I'm a programmer, that's my training). In 2010 he said his software wasn't retaining the contents of iPhone users' address books. In 2012 he said he was deleting the info he said he had not retained. Come on, if he wasn't lying -- what was he doing??

If I got it wrong, I will retract and apologize.

But when someone is bullshitting you, and you know it, you can say "That's bullshit." If they ask you to prove it, you can if you want, or you could just leave it there. "I know bullshit when I see it." That's a corollary to "What you think matters."

There are people who are born knowing that what they think matters. I think it's a very small minority. And they push the rest of us around. Kids who throw tantrums know that what they think matters. Most self-made billionaires get it too, probably from a very young age. We're always trying to convince them that they're missing something important, if they would just listen they would see how it really is. But WYTM tells us that it isn't essential that they agree. As long as you know what you think, it doesn't always matter what the other person thinks (sometimes it does, if you need their approval or cooperation for something you want to do). And just because they think one thing doesn't mean you can't believe something else. And vice versa, of course.

If you accept WYTM you should also accept that WTTM -- What They Think Matters.

The world can get along just fine if we don't all agree all the time.

I need to be reminded of WYTM because when I grew up what I thought absolutely did not matter. Adults often put words in my mouth. They would infer intent that wasn't there. They would call me names based on how my body looked to them. When I objected they screamed as if I were hurting them. I kept thinking how unfair this was, but I accepted their judgment. They have no idea who I am. But they've decided what I think. The problem for 15-year-olds is that to a large extent we had to accept the adult vision of who we are. They were our whole world then. At 15 you look a lot like an adult, but you're still very much a child. And these people you trust are very confused about you, but you don't see it that way because They Know and You Don't. They aren't telling you that WYTM, quite the opposite. What You Think Counts For Shit. In all that confusion it's easy to forget that you matter. You get lost in trying to be who they say you are, and in more ways you're trying to not be who they say you are. It takes a lot of years to dig out of this hole.

Then, just a few years ago it dawned on me that my opinion mattered. That sometimes I could stop trying to persuade people of things. If someone hangs up on me, I don't have to call them back. If they don't like me that's fine. That's when things really started flipping around, in a nice way. That little switch in perspective eliminates a lot of the conflict and confusion, wasted energy and time. And gives you a chance at feeling happy most of the time.

One more thing. A few of the comments in response to Julie's query are negative about men. So I thought I'd add, as part of the ongoing battle of the sexes, with much love, a message to my 15-year-old self. 1. Women aren't always right. 2. Sometimes you are right. 3. Women have much better PR than we do. 4. Women can be assholes, just like men.

My poor 15-year-old self was raised by women to think they all are saints. That's not a very nice way to prepare a young man for a world with women in it. And women are still raising their children to believe this, btw.

 2/10/2012; 9:26:37 AM.   .

They're still out there, scattered, but still kickin butt -- the people who used ThinkTank, Ready and MORE outliners in the 80s.

I wrote about these products in my Outliners & Programming piece, written in 1988 as UserLand was starting up.

MORE was the ultimate in this series of outliners, and it had a very important feature that allowed you to use the structure of your document to control its appearance, as a printed document, a series of presentation slides, or a graphic tree chart. The graphics combined with this depth that made MORE an interesting product, imho.

Well, we now have that feature built into OPML Editor outlines. I'm starting to use it in two contexts. First, in the World Outline software, where it's already being used to render the blogpost and howto nodetypes, and in Scripting2, the software I use to edit and publish Scripting News.

Here's an example of a document rendered with the new techniques. If you used MORE you'll recognize the style immediately.

Another demo document.

Here's a screen shot of this blogpost being edited in the outliner. See the rules at the top of the page?

It works differently from MORE, which used a big dialog.

The rules are now specified in XML. There are advantages to doing it this way. I can just copy/paste the rules, or use the Boilerplate facility in the Bookmarks menu. We have lots of support for outlines of XML that dialogs don't get you. Just being able to drag the rules around an outline makes a big diff. The point is that rules are themselves a structural thing. Having them be edited in a structure turns out to be a big win.

Anyway, it works!

 2/9/2012; 5:07:12 PM.   .

I've been slowly learning JavaScript over the last few months, and just got bit by something that I think is a mistaken design. I bet it's bit everyone for whom it's not their first Algol-like language.

The problem came up with an image that had an "undefined" src property.

I could see it was undefined in Firebug. When the page loads it's not not undefined. I click on it, and boom it loses its definition. How could that be.

Well, you could have assigned it an undefined value. Let's look for an assignment. Found it.

Search on Google. Aha. The weirdness. You can call a function with fewer parameters than it defines. The unspecified parameters are (ta dahh) undefined.

Even C, the most laissez-faire language in AlgolLand doesn't allow this!

Once I knew what I was looking for I found it right off, fixed it, and all is good.

Adventures in programming with Uncle Davey.

 2/9/2012; 9:40:26 AM.   .

Apparently we're not finished with this story.

I forgot I had written this piece about Path at the end of 2010.

11/15/10: The tech industry is a virus. "After entering my name and email address, gender and password, it asked if it can use my location. I said yes. Then I went to the People section to start looking for friends to share my pictures with. I was astonished to see a list of suggestions, all of whom are people I know. I was confused. How could they know I know all these people? I jumped to an incorrect conclusion, they were all following me. I smiled -- it's really cool that all these people, some of whom I haven't spoken with in years, are following me on Path. After happily adding eight people (noting that Andrew Baron had signed up twice, with two different email addresses), I realized that can't be it. Some of these people are so totally offline they could never be using this app on its first day of public existence."

Oh yeah. Now I remember.

And that's not all. Ryan Tate at Gawker followed up with the Path CEO and he said it's not a prob because they're not retaining the data. He kept a copy of the email. Good thing because in the email Path said it isn't keep copies of people's address books. Uhhh and today we found that they are.

 2/8/2012; 8:38:46 PM.   .

This doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

I don't like the post I wrote about Path.

I'm not taking it back, and I don't want to explain it too much.

I don't know what anyone else should or shouldn't do. Sometimes I get the idea that I do, but then I realize I don't.

I don't like it when people say what I should do. And I'm a fan of the Golden Rule.

I'm going to be more careful about software I install, and will look for developers to say clearly that they aren't doing anything with my address book.

I will feel better about using Apple's products, which I do, if they would consider the personal data I enter into my iPhone, iPad and Mac to be mine and not to share it with anyone, unless I explicitly ask them to. Thanks.

 2/8/2012; 4:26:11 PM.   .

No software company wants people to feel the way any iPhone user feels about Path right now. That's their problem. Path investor Mike Arrington gets it 100 percent wrong. Companies caught stealing private data from users have a serious problem, possibly one that can't be recovered from. He shouldn't put his own rep out there. His advice to Path is terrible. Instead he should be quietly working with his other investments to be sure they aren't doing the bone-headed thing Path was doing with users' data, and if they are, they should proactively clean up their act, publicly.

I just took a look at my contact info, which is shared between several of my web services. I wonder how many of them feel as Path does, that whatever is within their reach is theirs for the taking. And despite what they tell you most users think the contents of their address book is theirs and not Dave Morin's or Mike Arrington's.

Mike and Dave, if it's not a problem, would you please immediately publish the full contents of your address books. No fair editing. Let's see what you have going on. Heh. Not much chance of that is there?

Users, it's time to wise up. It's not just about being open, it's realizing that you have more at stake here than you might think. The people who run these companies are just like people who run all companies. They don't know you, care about you or look out for you. If there's something they can do to make a buck, no matter how cheap or sleazy, they're going to do it.

I was once fairly naive about this myself. I had a failed hard drive on my Mac laptop. Brought it into the Apple store. They wanted a lot of money for the replacement drive, and they wouldn't give me back my old drive. The one with all my private info on it. It's as if I had a wallet malfunction and the wallet manufacturer would sell me an overpriced replacement, and wanted to hold on to all my credit cards, and other private stuff I keep in my wallet.

This is a really bad situation.

And let's be clear. The real culprit is Apple. They let app developers have access to users' private data without asking for permission. They're really careful with their own data, but they clearly don't give a damn about their users' security.

Update -- there's a lot more to the story.

 2/8/2012; 10:30:54 AM.   .

I care about the open web because it's the platform I develop on.

I have good skills and development tools for the Web and Mac OS and Windows. So that's where I develop. If I have my way I'll be able to continue doing that indefinitely, but I worry about Apple and the future of the Mac. I have a feeling the same reasons I can't develop for IOS will turn out to make the Mac impossible for me to work on. Or maybe I'll have to stop updating my system at some point.

For a while it seemed that Twitter was part of the platform. The API was open to anyone, and was largely unlimited. It was an open notification system for the web, which I thought was a really neat idea. Over time it's become more and more restrictive, and eventually I lost interest. It would have taken a lot of work just to keep my apps running on Twitter, and I didn't have any more ideas I cared about. Time to move on.

Can't develop for IOS, my software does not even slightly fit into their idea of an "app" -- so that's not an option.

So that's me. What about users? I think more will care over time, as the corporate platforms restrict what they do more and more, and extend their reach into areas more users consider off-limits. And users will want to do new things, as the technology moves forward. All this points, inexorably toward the next trip around the loop we've been around so many times.

There's another reason to care. Here's an analogy with hindsight. Suppose you were a home owner in 2005 (I was). All around you are people doing crazy things with mortgages. There's intuitively something wrong about what's going on, it's so diseconomic. Yeah, as it turns out, even if you were being totally conservative about your home investment, you should have been worried. I lost quite a bit of money because I shrugged it off. WTF, everyone else is doing it.

That's the way people talk about Facebook. Everyone's doing it so WTF. But if they're really thinking, they might be making the same mistake the homeowners in 2005 were making. Free lunches usually have a price. Heh. They always have a price.

 2/7/2012; 3:48:49 PM.   .

It was an interesting but fairly ordinary game until the last few minutes, when it became one for the ages. And a reminder to anyone who thinks strategically, no matter what business they're in, that the linear route isn't always the right way to go. Especially when the stakes are very high.

Slate has a great piece that summarizes the oddness of the last few minutes. I'll provide my own summary

The Giants had the ball, down by two points, and were in field goal range at the two-minute warning. The Giants had one timeout remaining, the Patriots had two. Those are the variables. At some point in the campaign, one of the announcers said it might be better for the Giants to run out the clock, force the Patriots to use their timeouts, and go for the field goal. My mind rebelled at the thought that, given the chance to score a touchdown, the Giants would opt for a field goal. But it quickly became obvious that this, paradoxically, was the best approach. Because there were other variables that mattered more than the absolute number of points on the scoreboard. That's the part that makes a strategist stop and think. In business is it only the number of dollars in your bank account that matters? Of course not. It matters what country the dollars are in, what currency, what taxes are owed on it, and what the rate of flow of money is, and which way it's going. In health, is it only how long you live? Of course not -- quality of life matters more. Everything is like that. The outcome isn't as simple as they would have you believe.

Since this is mostly a tech blog and not a football blog, there's a tech angle to this as well.

On Saturday I wrote yet another in a series of pieces going back to the 90s that explained why the NYT should pick up the ball and run with it, instead of kibitzing on the sidelines about the fortunes people are making all around them, while their staff continues to shrink and their future grows more doubtful all the time. As with the Giants there are a lot of variables, not just the paper they have to put out every day (an idea which has become an anachronism). What little response I got from the Times came from staffers who dismissed it without considering (I assume) any of the subtleties.

As with the end of many SuperBowls, there is no linear answer. I said the Times could have been Facebook, this is what the Times people took issue with even though it was just one short sentence. By that I meant, they could have been the champions. The Times never would have been exactly Facebook, just as the Giants and the Patriots are different teams, led by quarterbacks and coaches with different histories and temperment. They come in all sizes and shapes. But the Times could have been and imho should have been the place where newsmakers go to make news. We're all losing a lot, not just the owners of the Times, because that place is being run by the Silicon Valley tech industry and not the tradition of, for example, the Pentagon Papers. Twitter says they'll cave to government censorship, of course -- but it seems to me the Times would have been better prepared for this obvious eventuality. Do you see how we all have a stake in this outcome, not just the owners of the various companies?

BTW, I read on Rex's blog that the reason Scott Adams blogs is that it gets him going for four hours of creativity in what he does professionally, writing and drawing cartoons. I realized that's what I do too! I think it works like this. I have a load of creativity that's not exactly on-topic for my work that's accumulated over the last 24 or 48 hours. Ideas that came to the surface, intrigued me, were pondered and conclusions were reached. My internal driver, the one that lets new ideas come to the surface needs to feel that the previous ideas had been properly loved. Hence the blog post.

One more thing. The best commercial in the SuperBowl, for me -- was the lovely Fiat commercial, which begins with a somewhat nerdy youngish guy stopped on the street in awe of an Italian beauty. She sees him, yells at him, slaps him, and seduces him. All of which is a huge schwinnnnng for guys like me. I'm not going to spoil the ending, but it's realllly cool, esp if you like beautiful feisty Italian women and cars (which I do, both).

 2/6/2012; 9:29:13 AM.   .

I will always love Scoble for who he is, and who he is not. He is a great user. I love users. I named a company after users. Users are everything. The only reason to make software is for users. That's my basis for respecting Scoble.

But I'm not going back to Facebook, no matter what Scoble says.

Let me tell you a story. In 1993 I quit software, defeated. Perfectly able to write good code, but I was unable to get my ideas through the gatekeepers, the big companies, and one in particular -- Apple. I spent year after year trying to appease them, to no avail. They broke every deal. They told other developers not to work with us. I gave up. Stopped writing code. Wondered what I would do with the rest of my life.

Then I saw the web. It meant everything to me, because now there was no Apple in my way telling me I couldn't make programming tools because that's something they had an exclusive on. I was able to make web content tools, and evolve them, and get them to users, and learn from our experiences, without the supervision of any corporate guys, who see our communities as nothing more than a business model.

So Scoble, you can go enjoy whatever it is you like about Facebook. I can't imagine what that might be. I don't use it because that would be like going back to the system that didn't work. I'd rather work for a very small minority of free users, than try to be an approved vendor in a world controlled by a bunch of suits. For me that's the end. I'd rather go make pottery in Italy or Slovenia.

BTW, I get invited to events that say check out the Facebook page for details about where to be and when. If I care about the event, I write back to them telling them I don't use Facebook, and would read about it if they put up a blog post. Otherwise I can't come. If people hear that a few times, it'll start changing behavior. It's not the kind of thing you need a lot of people to do to force change. It's kind of like Apple refusing to put Flash on their iPhone and iPad. I don't imagine too many events would get reconceived just for me, but if a few more people do it, that could be enough to make the change.

To me Facebook already feels over. I really don't feel like I'm missing anything. Look at it this way. There's lots of stuff going on right now that I'm not part of. That's the way it goes. Me and Facebook are over. It's going to stay that way. And if I'm on a ship that's sinking, well I've had a good run, and I can afford to go down with the ship, along with people who share my values. It's a cause, I've discovered, that's worth giving something up for.

I notice that you still occasionally do a blog post. So there's hope for you too! I keep praying that Facebook kicks you off their site again. It would be the biggest favor anyone could do for you.

 2/5/2012; 12:01:59 AM.   .

Henry Blodget and Kamelia Angelova wrote an inspiring piece in Business Insider about the "incredible shrinking New York Times."

They inspired me to try to connect the dots for the Times management, once again. There is a solution to the puzzle, but it requires some radical redirection of attention.

Here are the dots.

Tumblr is hiring reporters to cover itself.

Reddit is doing a great interview of a NYT reporter who wrote a book about the Obama Administration. Brian Stelter, a reporter for the Times says it's the best interview of her he's seen. (She's done a lot of interviews lately.)

Last weekend at a conference in NYC, Stelter said Sources Go Direct keeps him up at night.

Facebook will soon go public with so much cash being generated, and the Times could have been Facebook. But they keep missing that the economics of news is rapidly changing. They erected a Maginot Line to try once more to insist that there has been no change. But it's just keeping them from growing.

The function of a newsroom in the future is to coordinate the voices of the world to produce a coherent news product. That job will be done in very much the model that Tumblr is doing it. You could have started with a blogging community or you could have started with a news organization, but they're both heading to the same place.

The Times of course has the best newsroom. So why don't they evolve a blogging platform like Tumblr's? They should have. I've been begging them to do it since the mid-90s. There's still time to gather some of the leftover energy in the web, and to be prepared to catch some of the deserters when Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter et al stumble at growing into the space formerly occupied exclusively by the Times, Wash Post, etc.

But less time remains all the time.

Update: The social media editor of the Times read the piece. Apparently she doubts that the Times could have been Facebook. Why? I think it could have been a lot more. Actually I still believe it could be a lot more.

 2/4/2012; 12:20:18 PM.   .

It's winter and instead of bike-riding I'm walking. Which means I can listen to music and podcasts and audiobooks while getting my daily exercise. And since my daily walk takes me near Strawberry Fields in Central Park, and near the spot where John Lennon died, I end up thinking about the Beatles a lot. And I've been listening to them too.

Another thing makes a big difference, having Wikipedia pages about almost every Beatles song. For example, I didn't fully understand how the Beatles were breaking up while doing the White Album. I didn't understand how separate McCartney and Lennon were, how bitter George Harrison was, and how frustrated Ringo Starr was that they all couldn't just get along.

There really was a Bungalow Bill and a Prudence, they were real people.

I think it's spooky that one of Lennon's last Beatles songs was Happiness is a Warm Gun, considering how he died.

But the thing that I'm left with is rather mundane, but I wanted to say it anyway. Paul McCartney was, of all the Beatles, the pure songman. He wrote music because he loved music. He really didn't want to do anything else. For him, being a Beatle was the best deal in the world.

Now that probably still is a gross approximation of who McCartney is. But without the net, without Wikipedia, I didn't even have that much to go on. Music is a story, like every other human art. It's the story of one person laid out in a way that others can understand it. A song is saying here I am and this is what I say. Reading the story of the story gives me more to think, and imagine about.

I guess I just wanted to say that all along we had the idea that Lennon was the deep Beatle, and McCartney was somehow the silly one. But I think we got it wrong. As he sang later, there's nothing wrong with a silly love song. Popular music is popular for a reason, because it engages us in a playful way that makes us feel good. Yes we feel a little silly when this point is touched. But that's kind of nice too.

 2/4/2012; 9:56:38 AM.   .