Dave Winer drew my attention to this. (It’s now noon in the UK, so there are three hours to go.) Dave, needless to say, has a theory about it. But I’m completely in the dark. As usual.
2.12pm:Just opened an email from my mate Andrew who says that it’s obviously the news that the Beatles’ music is finally being sold by the iTunes store. Now why didn’t I think of that?
Observed in Venice one afternoon last week.
Dan Gillmor takes a pretty sceptical view of Facebook’s new messaging system.
In a feature that Facebook thinks is great — and will thrill law enforcement and divorce lawyers — every conversation will be captured for posterity, unless users delete specific messages or entire conversations. Do you assume that the people with whom you communicate are saving every text message and IM? You’d better.
That’s only one of the things that makes me cautious about the service. Facebook’s privacy record is spotty enough already; trusting the company to archive and protect my communications? Not so likely.
Om Malik is much more complimentary:
Facebook has not only reinvented the idea of the inbox, but it has gone one better: it has done so by moving away from the traditional idea of email. One of the reasons why Yahoo and Google Mail have struggled to become entirely social is because it is hard to graft a social hierarchy on top of tools of communication. If you look at Gmail – it has most of the elements that are available in the new social inbox, but they are all discrete elements and give the appearance of many different silos, being cobbled together.
Facebook did the exact opposite – it imagined email only as a subset of what is in reality communication. SMS, Chat, Facebook messages, status updates and email is how Zuckerberg sees the world. With the address book under its control, Facebook is now looking to become the “interaction hub” of our post-broadband, always-on lives. Having trained nearly 350 million people to use its stream-based, simple inbox, Facebook has reinvented the “communication” experience.
The deadpan NYT report on the new initiative is here.
So much for the meme that the rise of Apps implies the ‘death’ of the Web.
A colleague, listening to a presentation at a recent symposium I attended.
On the Rialto there’s an incredible crush of people wanting to have their photograph taken against the background of the Grand Canal. What’s interesting is the genuine pleasure they get from this.
Bill Keegan, the Observer‘s economics commentator, tells a nice story about how the Labour Leader, Michael Foot, lampooned Sir Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s policy guru, in the early 1980s. Foot, says Keegan, gave
a virtuoso display in a speech which had both sides of the Commons in stitches. He was referring to Sir Keith Joseph, who had played the role of John the Baptist to Thatcher. Foot was speaking when, as now, the Conservatives were conducting a frontal assault on the fabric of British society. He had long tried to recall, said Foot, of whom the right honourable gentleman (Joseph) reminded him. It had suddenly come to him: in his youth, Foot had gone to the Palace Theatre in Plymouth on Saturday nights, where a “magician-conjuror” used to take a gold watch from a member of the audience, wrap it in a red handkerchief, and smash it “to smithereens”. Then, while the audience sat there in suspense, a puzzled look would come over his countenance, and he would say: “I’m very sorry – I’ve forgotten the rest of the trick.” Foot concluded: “That’s the situation of the government.”
Well, I suspect that is also the position of the present government. Thatcher at least had the excuse of fighting double-digit inflation. This government has invented an excuse – namely that the cuts are required to avoid the treatment that the bond markets have been meting out to Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
A snip at €40.00. Presumeably sex appeal costs extra.
“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”.
Christopher Hitchens, quoted by Andrew Anthony in today’s Observer New Review.
Image used under Creative Commons licence from Flikr user: www.flickr.com/photos/cryztalvisions/2422753682/
Dave Winer has a lovely blog post in which he explains why Facebook (and Google and all those other ‘free’ services) are effectively hamster cages for humans.
They make a wide variety of colorful and fun cages for hamsters that are designed to keep the hamster, and their human owners, entertained for hours. When you get tired of one, you can buy another. It’s looks great until you realize one day, that you can’t get out! That’s the whole point of a cage.
Remember how they used to say: “If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is?” They still say it. :-)
Another one: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Exactly.
When they say you get to use their social network for free, look for the hidden price. It’s there. They’re listening and watching. It’s pretty and colorful and endlessly fun for you and your human owner.
Or, as one of the commenters on Dave’s post put it: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you are the product being sold.”
