The cookie monster cometh

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This morning’s Observer column.

Needless to say, this intrusion of EU red tape into Britons’ ancient right to do as they damn well please generated much heated commentary. The jackbooted thugs of Brussels were, we were told, going to “kill the internet”. But the law is the law and, alarmed by the lack of preparedness of British industry, the government negotiated a year-long “lead-in period” to give businesses time to adapt to the new reality.

We’re now midway through that period, and the information commissioner – the guy who will have to enforce the new rules – has just issued a half-term report on how things are going. His verdict, he writes, “can be summed up by the schoolteacher’s favourite clichés: ‘could do better’ and ‘must try harder’.”

The Apps fallacy

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It’s funny to watch the current obsession with Apps. It reminds me of Aldous Huxley’s idea that we would be destroyed by things that delight us. In the news arena, Apps are the route by which the old dinosaurs of the mass media world hope to re-establish control. It won’t work, but it’ll take a while before people realise why. They could save a lot of time by reading Dave Winer.

I’ll keep playing here while the rest of you flirt with apps. I’ll be here when you come back. I know it’s going to happen. Here’s why.

Linking.

Visualize each of the apps they want you to use on your iPad or iPhone as a silo. A tall vertical building. It might feel very large on the inside, but nothing goes in or out that isn’t well-controlled by the people who created the app. That sucks!

The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it if you want to get my point.

We pay some people to be Big Thinkers for us, but mostly they just say things that please people with money. It pleases the money folk to think that the wild and crazy and unregulated world of the web is no longer threatening them. That users are happy to live in a highly regulated, Disneyfied app space, without all that messy freedom.

I’ll stay with the web.

Me too.

Steven Johnson’s Hearst Lecture is a more extended riff on the same theme. Well worth reading in full. Which of course rather makes Dave’s point: you can click on the link and go straight to the lecture. Which you can’t do in most apps. The medium is the message: no linking; stay inside the glass box.

Quote of the Day

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Technology’s greatest contribution is to permit people to be incompetent at a larger and larger range of things. Only by embracing such incompetence is the human race able to progress.

Theodore Gray, from his blog. You need to read the entire piece to understand his logic.

15,000 new Apps a week!

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Fascinating piece in the New York Times

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The pace of new app development dwarfs the release of other kinds of media. “Every week about 100 movies get released worldwide, along with about 250 books,” said Anindya Datta, the founder and chairman of Mobilewalla, which helps users navigate the mobile app market. “That compares to the release of around 15,000 apps per week.”

According to Mobilewalla, in a fairly quiet 14 days before the release of app No. 1,000,000, an average of 543 apps were released each day for Android-based devices, and an average of 745 apps hit the market daily for the iPhone, iPad and iTouch. The total for the two weeks across the Apple, Android, BlackBerry and Windows platforms was 20,738.

A product was counted each time it was designed for a different device in the climb to a million apps. So when Urbanspoon was released for iPhone, BlackBerry, iPad and Android, it was counted four times because each platform demands different code from the developers.

By any measure, the rise in apps is striking. In October 2008 the known app universe was 8,000 Apple titles. Mobilewalla was formed that year to provide a Web site for users to search for mobile apps, and to categorize and rank them.

Mobilewalla began analyzing Android and Windows apps in 2009, and added BlackBerry a year later. The 100,000-app milestone was passed in December 2009. In little more than a year, the total passed 500,000 and exceeded 750,000 six months after that. Five months later: one million.

2011 in 20/20 vision

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Technology review 2011: Twitter rules, BlackBerry crumbles and TS Eliot is reimagined.

That’s how the Observer summarised my retrospective look at the world of technology in 2011. I did also write about Facebook’s ‘valuation’, Apple’s extraordinary year, government fantasies about the employment potential of start-ups, HP, Nokia and the role of social networking in political upheaval.

All seen with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, of course.